An XPath reduction algorithm for fast querying of digital libraries in XML

Abstract

Digital contents in XML are rapidly increasing on the Web. In our work, we assume that the XML data is stored in a relational database using the popular node numbering scheme and propose a technique to pre-process XPath queries in order to convert them into a much more efficient form that will run several times faster. Our algorithm uses a special data structure called XIP (XML Instance Path) tree of each XML document to reduce a given XPath query (i.e., path expression) into a more simpler form. The benefits of the approach is more significant for long length queries, making it useful for digital libraries storing large and complex structured XML documents for multimedia or business applications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.