A Fuzzy Extension for the XPath Query Language [chapter]

Alessandro Campi, Sam Guinea, Paola Spoletini
2006 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
XML has become a widespread format for data exchange over the Internet. The current state of the art in querying XML data is represented by XPath and XQuery, both of which rely on Boolean conditions for node selection. Boolean selection is too restrictive when users do not use or even know the data structure precisely, e.g. when queries are written based on a summary rather than on a precise representation of the schema. In this paper we describe a XML querying framework, called FuzzyXPath,
more » ... d on Fuzzy Set Theory, relying on fuzzy conditions for the definition of flexible constraints on stored data. To this end, we introduce a function called "deep-similar", which aims at substituting XPath's typical "deep-equal" function. Its goal is to provide a degree of similarity between two XML trees, assessing whether they are similar both structure-wise and content-wise. Several query examples are discussed in the field of XML-based metadata for e-learning.
doi:10.1007/11766254_18 fatcat:ojeh6w7l7zb7tglwswdzcb54jm