Fragmentation techniques for XML data are gaining momentum within both distributed and centralized XML query engines and pose novel and unrecognized challenges to the community. Albeit not novel, and clearly inspired by the classical divide et impera principle, fragmentation for XML trees has been proved successful in boosting the querying performance, and in cutting down the memory requirements. However, fragmentation considered so far has been driven by semantics, i.e. built around query

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... cates. In this paper, we propose a novel fragmentation technique that founds on structural constraints of XML documents (size, tree-width, and tree-depth) and on special-purpose structure histograms able to meaningfully summarize XML documents. This allows us to predict bounding intervals of structural properties of output (XML) fragments for efficient query processing of distributed XML data. An experimental evaluation of our study confirms the effectiveness of our fragmentation methodology on some representative XML data sets.