FleXPath: Flexible Structure and Full-Text Querying for XML

Querying XML data is a well-explored topic with powerful databasestyle query languages such as XPath and XQuery set to become W3C standards. An equally compelling paradigm for querying XML documents is full-text search on textual content. In this paper, we study fundamental challenges that arise when we try to integrate these two querying paradigms. While keyword search is based on approximate matching, XPath has exact match semantics. We address this mismatch by considering queries on structure as a "template", and looking for answers that best match this template and the full-text search. To achieve this, we provide an elegant definition of relaxation on structure and define primitive operators to span the space of relaxations. Query answering is now based on ranking potential answers on structural and full-text search conditions. We set out certain desirable principles for ranking schemes and propose natural ranking schemes that adhere to these principles. We develop effi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Sihem Amer-Yahia, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Shashank Pandit
• Keywords: Database, Full-text Search, Full-text Search Conditions, Natural Ranking Schemes, SIGMOD 2004