Approximate matching in XML

Abstract

The success of XML lies in its ability to easily represent homogeneous data as well as heterogeneous data. In particular, features such as optionality (e.g., a book may or may not have an associated cdrom), repetition (e.g., a chapter may have zero or more sections), alternation (e.g., a book may have either editors or authors),and nesting (e.g., a section may have nested sections) permit considerable variability among XML data conforming to the same schema. When querying or correlating such heterogeneous XML data, exact matching is typically inadequate, resulting in either too few or too many matches. Approximate matching, along with ranking the results of this matching, in the same spirit as Information Retrieval (IR) approaches, is more appropriate.Flexible specification of approximate matching over structure and content, and efficient evaluation of such specifications, create new challenges and exciting opportunities for the database research and development communities. In this seminar, we survey the research in the database and IR communities on this subject, including language proposals for the flexible specification of approximate matching in XML, and optimized evaluation strategies for approximate matching.