Detecting changes in XML documents

We present a diff algorithm for XML data. This work is motivated by the support for change control in the context of the Xyleme project that is investigating dynamic warehouses capable of storing massive volumes of XML data. Because of the context, our algorithm has to be very efficient in terms of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:18th International Conference on Data Engineering: Proceedings 2002: San Jose, California pp. 41 - 52
Main Authors: Cobena, G., Abiteboul, S., Marian, A.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: Los Alamitos CA IEEE 2002
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Change detection algorithms
Computer science; control theory; systems
Costs
Crawlers
Data warehouses
Database languages
Exact sciences and technology
HTML
Information systems. Data bases
Memory organisation. Data processing
Performance analysis
Software
Subscriptions
Web and internet services
XML
Information use
HTML language
World wide web
Data storage
XML language
Performance analysis
Algorithm analysis
Pattern matching
ISBN:9780769515311, 0769515312
ISSN:1063-6382
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present a diff algorithm for XML data. This work is motivated by the support for change control in the context of the Xyleme project that is investigating dynamic warehouses capable of storing massive volumes of XML data. Because of the context, our algorithm has to be very efficient in terms of speed and memory space even at the cost of some loss of quality. Also, it considers, besides insertions, deletions and updates (standard in diffs), a move operation on subtrees that is essential in the context of XML. Intuitively, our diff algorithm uses signatures to match (large) subtrees that were left unchanged between the old and new versions. Such exact matchings are then possibly propagated to ancestors and descendants to obtain more matchings. It also uses XML specific information such as ID attributes. We provide a performance analysis of the algorithm. We show that it runs in average in linear time vs. quadratic time for previous algorithms. We present experiments on synthetic data that confirm the analysis. Since this problem is NP-hard, the linear time is obtained by trading some quality. We present experiments (again on synthetic data) that show that the output of our algorithm is reasonably close to the optimal in terms of quality. Finally we present experiments on a small sample of XML pages found on the Web.
ISBN:9780769515311
0769515312
ISSN:1063-6382
DOI:10.1109/ICDE.2002.994696