A query expression and processing technique for an XML search engine

Abstract

One of the virtues of XML is that it allows complex structures to be easily expressed. This allows XML to be used as an intermediate, neutral, and standard form for representing many types of structured or semistructured documents that arise in a great variety of applications. To support for efficient queries against XML data, many query languages have been designed. The query languages require the users to know the structure of the XML documents and specify path-based search conditions on the structure. This path-based query against XML documents is a natural consequence of the hierarchical structure of XML. However, it is also desirable to allow the users to formulate no path queries against XML documents, to complement the current path-based queries. In this paper, we have developed a query expression and processing technique supporting non-navigational content-based queries for an XML search engine. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.