Object Semantics for XML Keyword Search
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Date
2013-05-21T01:18:54Z
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Abstract
We know that some XML elements correspond to objects (in the sense of object-orientation) and others do not. The question we consider in this paper is what benefits we can derive from paying attention to such object semantics, particularly for the problem of keyword queries. Keyword queries against XML data have been studied extensively in recent years, with several
lowest-common-ancestor based schemes proposed for this purpose, including SLCA, MLCA, VLCA, and ELCA. It is easy to see that identifying objects can help each of these techniques return more meaningful answers than just the LCA node (or
subtree). It is more interesting to see that object semantics can also be used to benefit the search itself. For this purpose, we introduce a novel nearest common object node semantics (NCON), which includes not just common ancestors but also common descendants and referenced objects in evaluating a query. We have developed XComplete, a system for our NCON-based approach, and used it in our extensive experimental evaluation. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the existing LCA-based approaches in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.