AxPRE Summaries: Exploring the (Semi-)Structure of XML Web Collections

The nature of semistructured data in web collections is evolving. Increasingly, XML web documents (or documents exchanged via web services) are valid with regard to a schema, yet the actual structure of such documents exhibits significant variations across collections for several reasons: the schema is very lax (e.g., RSS feeds), the schema is large and different subsets are used (e.g., industry standards like UBL), or open content models allow arbitrary schemas to be mixed (e.g., RSS extensions like those used for podcasting). Many web development tasks that incorporate XPath queries to process XML documents require an understanding of the actual structure present in the collection. This paper introduces the unique capabilities of AxPRE summaries for exploring the (semi-)structure of large XML collections. AxPRE summaries are implemented in a tool, DescribeX, that supports visualizing XML collections via summaries that can be interactively refined using a powerful and descriptive axi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Mariano P. Consens, Flavio Rizzolo, Alejandro A. Vaisman
• Keywords: Database, Gigabyte Collections, ICDE 2008, Large Xml Collections, XML Documents