Survey on Keyword Search over XML Documents

Abstract

Since XML has become a standard for information exchange over the Internet, more and more data are represented as XML. XML keyword search has been attracted a lot of interests because it provides a simple and user-friendly interface to query XML documents. This paper provides a survey on keyword search over XML document. We mainly focus on the topics of defining semantics for XML keyword search and the corresponding algorithms to find answers based on these semantics. We classify existing works for XML keyword search into three main types, which are tree-based approaches, graph-based approaches and semantics-based approaches. For each type of approaches, we further classify works into sub-classes and especially we summarize, make comparison and point out the relationships among sub-classes. In addition, for each type of approach, we point out the common problems they suffer