XS-Diff: XML schema change detection algorithm

Abstract

Detecting changes in XML data has emerged as an important research issue in the last decade, but the majority of change detection algorithms focus on XML documents rather than on their schemas because documents that contain data are deemed more significant than the schema itself. However, the XML schema change detection tool is essential, especially in situations where we need to maintain related XML documents with evolving schema, sustain relational schema generated by schema-conscious approach for storing XML data and provide support for XML versioning. This paper focuses on XML Schema (XSD) changes and provides a more meaningful description of the detected changes. Our proposed algorithm XS-Diff uses the technique of storing XML Schema versions in a relational database where the detection and storage of delta changes are employed on relational tables. We demonstrate the correctness of the proposed algorithm through both synthetic and real data sets without deteriorating the execution time.