Element Retrieval Using Namespace Based on Keyword Search over XML Documents

Querying over XML elements using keyword search is steadily gaining popularity. The traditional similarity measure is widely employed in order to effectively retrieve various XML documents. A number of authors have already proposed different similarity-measure methods that take advantage of the structure and content of XML documents. However, they do not consider the similarity between latent semantic information of element texts and that of keywords in a query. Although many algorithms on XML element search are available, some of them have the high computational complexity due to searching for a huge number of elements. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that makes use of the se-mantic similarity between elements instead of between entire XML documents, considering not only the structure and content of an XML document, but also semantic information of namespaces in elements. We compare our algorithm with the three other algorithms by testing on real datasets. The experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method is able to improve the query accuracy, as well as to reduce the running time.