• Journal of KIISE:Databases
• /
• v.32 no.4
• /
• pp.452-472
• /
• 2005

We propose XIR-Branching, a novel method for processing partial match queries on heterogeneous XML documents using information retrieval(IR) techniques and novel instance join techniques. A partial match query is defined as the one having the descendent-or-self axis '//' in its path expression. In its general form, a partial match query has branch predicates forming branching paths. The objective of XIR-Branching is to efficiently support this type of queries for large-scale documents of heterogeneous schemas. XIR-Branching has its basis on the conventional schema-level methods using relational tables(e.g., XRel, XParent, XIR-Linear[21]) and significantly improves their efficiency and scalability using two techniques: an inverted index technique and a novel prefix match join. The former supports linear path expressions as the method used in XIR-Linear[21]. The latter supports branching path expressions, and allows for finding the result nodes more efficiently than containment joins used in the conventional methods. XIR-Linear shows the efficiency for linear path expressions, but does not handle branching path expressions. However, we have to handle branching path expressions for querying more in detail and general. The paper presents a novel method for handling branching path expressions. XIR-Branching reduces a candidate set for a query as a schema-level method and then, efficiently finds a final result set by using a novel prefix match join as an instance-level method. We compare the efficiency and scalability of XIR-Branching with those of XRel and XParent using XML documents crawled from the Internet. The results show that XIR-Branching is more efficient than both XRel and XParent by several orders of magnitude for linear path expressions, and by several factors for branching path expressions.