An Algorithm for Finding top-K Valid XPath Queries

Abstract

Suppose that we have a DTD and XML documents valid against the DTD, and consider writing an XPath query to the documents. Unfortunately, a user often does not understand the entire structure of the documents exactly, especially in the case where the documents are very large and/or complex, or the DTD has been updated but the user misses it. In such cases, the user tends to write an invalid XPath query. However, it is difficult for the user to correct the query by hand due to his/her lack of exact knowledge about the entire structure of the documents. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that finds, for an XPath query q, a DTD D, and a positive integer K, top-K XPath queries most syntactically close to q among the XPath queries conforming to D, so that a user select an appropriate query among the K queries. We also present some experimental studies.