A Minimization Technique of XML Path Comparison Based on Signature

Abstract

Since XML allows users to define any tags, XML documents with various structures have been created. Accordingly, many studies on clustering and searching the XML documents based on the similarity of paths have been done in order to manage the documents efficiently. To retrieve XML documents having similar structures, the three-dimensional bitmap indexing technique uses a path as a unit when it creates an index. If a path structure is changed, the technique recognizes it as a new path. Thus, another technique to measure the similarity of paths was proposed.
To compute the similarity between two paths, the technique compares every node of the paths. It causes unnecessary comparison of the nodes, which do not exist in common between the two paths. In this paper, we propose a new technique that minimizes the comparison using signatures and show the performance evaluation results of the technique. The comparison speed of proposed technique was 20 percent faster than the existing technique.