Effective Evaluation of XML Queries in a Visual Environment
Weimin He, Teng Lv, Ping Yan
Journal of Digital Information Management, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2019.
DOI: 10.6025/jdim/2019/17/3/113-121
Link: http://dline.info/fpaper/jdim/v17i3/jdimv17i3_1.pdf
Abstract:
Since its emergence in 1997, Extensible
Markup Language (XML) has become a standard data
format for data exchange among a variety of web applications.
In this paper, we present a framework to effectively
evaluate XML queries in a visual environment. We have
developed a system termed VXPath, which is a visual
XPath query evaluator that allows the user to evaluate
various XPath queries by clicking the nodes in an expanding
tree instead of typing the whole XPath queries
manually. Our system GUI is built on top of Microsoft
.NET Windows Forms Applications. We have implemented
most XPath axes in our system, including child,
descendant, self, parent, ancestor, following-sibling, preceding-
sibling, predicate and so on. In order to handle
large size XML documents, instead of loading the whole
XML document into memory, we developed an effective
algorithm to extract a concise data synopsis called structural
summary from the original XML document to avoid
the loading overhead for large XML documents. We evaluated
our system over the data from XMark and DBLP and
our system can handle large XML documents up to
gigabytes.