XDSearch: an efficient search engine for XML document schemata

摘要

Electronic commerce is an emerging trade model under dramatically rapid development. So far, enormous numbers of business transactions have been conducted over the Internet. It is believed that extensible markup language (XML) is the best layout format for exchanging messages over the Internet. Since XML developers can define their own elements, it is common that various elements may be used to illustrate the same thing or one element name is used to describe different things. This makes it extremely difficult to exchange XML documents among businesses, not to mention redundant investments in the design of XML documents. If a business can obtain a document schema similar to the one that is currently being used and modify the schema to fit its needs, then not only can the development costs be reduced, but also the redundancy in the design of XML documents can be saved. Furthermore, the difficulty in data interchanges among trading partners can be alleviated. To solve the problems, many well-known international organizations have joined forces to develop XML repositories in the hope of increasing reusability of collected document schemata. Unfortunately, there is scarcely any efficient search mechanism provided for these XML repositories. In this paper, by taking advantage of the concept of ontology and the neural network techniques, we shall propose and implement a search engine, called XDSearch, for XML document schemata. XDSearch allows developers to easily and quickly locate document schemata in an XML repository as close to what they need as possible.