A Methodology for Coupling Fragments of XPath with Structural Indexes for XML Documents

Abstract

Supporting efficient access to XML data using XPath continues to be an important research problem. XPath queries are used to specify nondelabeled trees which match portions of the hierarchical XML data. In XPath query evaluation, indices similar to those used in relational database systems, namely, value indices on tags and text values- are first used, together with structural join algorithms. This approach turns out to be simple and efficient. However, the structural containment relationships native to XML data are not directly captured by value indices.