Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A fuzzy extension of the XPath query language

  • Published:
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Today 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 schema. In this paper we describe a XML querying framework, called FuzzyXPath, based on Fuzzy Set Theory, which relies on fuzzy conditions for the definition of flexible constraints on stored data. A function called “deep-similar” is introduced to replace XPath’s typical “deep-equal” function. The main 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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. By contrast with classical set theory, there are different possible definitions for these operations, although some of them are more often adopted. For an overview of these definitions refer to Zadeh (1965).

  2. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for user-defined ComplexTypes. The reader interested in fuzzy matchings for complex XML types may read Damiani et al. (2004).

  3. The vocabulary we use is called JWordNet, and is available at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/.

  4. This turns comparing two paths S and T into computing deep-similarity of multiple pairs of subtrees (as many as the product of S and T node sets cardinalities) and taking the maximum of the resulting similarity values (coherently with the typical existential quantification of XPath conditions).

References

  • Amer-Yahia, S., Cho, S., & Srivastava, D. (2002). Tree pattern relaxation. In C. S. Jensen, K. G. Jeffery, J. Pokorńy S. Saltenis, E. Bertino, K. Böhm, et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th international conference on extending database technology: Advances in database technology (25 – 27 March 2002). Extending database technology (Vol. 2287, pp. 496–513). London: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amer-Yahia, S., Lakshmanan, L. V. S., & Pandit, S. (2004). Flexpath: Flexible structure and full-text querying for XML. In SIGMOD ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data (pp. 83–94). New York: ACM.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Bosc, P., & Pivert, O. (1992). Fuzzy querying in conventional databases. In L. A. Zadeh & J. Kacprzyk (Eds.), Fuzzy logic for the management of uncertainty (pp. 645–671). New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bosc, P., Lietard, L., & Pivert, O. (1994). Soft querying, a new feature for database management systems. In D. Karagiannis (Ed.), Proceedings of the 5th international conference on database and expert systems applications (07 – 09 September 1994). Lecture notes in computer science, (Vol. 856, pp. 631–640). London: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bosc, P., Lietard, L., & Pivert, O. (1995). Quantified statements in a flexible relational query language. In SAC ’95: Proceedings of the 1995 ACM symposium on applied computing (pp. 488–492). New York: ACM.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Buche, P., Dibie-Barthèlemy, J., & Wattez, F. (2006). Approximate querying of XML fuzzy data. In Springer (Ed.), Proceedings of the 7th international conference FQAS 2006, (Vol. 4027/2006). Milan, Italy.

  • Calms, M. D., Prade, H., & Sdes, F. (2007). Flexible querying of semistructured data: A fuzzy-set-based approach. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 22(7), 723–737.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ceravolo, P., Damiani, E., & Viviani, M. (2007). Bottom-up extraction and trust-based refinement of ontology metadata. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 19(2), 149–163.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ciaccia, P., & Penzo, W. (2003). The collection index to support complex approximate queries. In Verlag, S. (Ed.), Proceedings of XSym 2003 (Vol. 2824, pp. 164–179).

  • Damiani, E., & Tanca, L. (2000). Blind queries to XML data. In MT. Ibrahim, J. Küng, & N. Revell, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th international conference on database and expert systems applications (04 – 08 September 2000). Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 1873, pp. 345–356). London: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damiani, E., Lavarini, N., Oliboni, B., & Tanca, L. (2004). An approximate query environment for XML data. In V. Loia, M. Nikravesh, & L. Zadeh (Eds.), Fuzzy logic and the internet, studies in fuzziness and soft computing (Vol. 137, pp. 71–94). Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damiani, E., Oliboni, B., & Tanca, L. (2001). Fuzzy techniques for XML data smushing. In Proceedings of the international conference, 7th fuzzy days on computational intelligence, theory and applications (pp. 637–652). London: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damiani, E., Tanca, L., & Arcelli-Fontana, F. (2000). Fuzzy XML queries via context-based choice of aggregations. Kybernetika, 16(3).

  • Dubois, D., Prade, H., & Sedes, F. (2001). Fuzzy logic techniques in multimedia database querying: A preliminary investigation of the potentials. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 13(3), 383–392.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Galindo, J., Medina, J., Pons, O., & Cubero, J. (1998). A server for fuzzy SQL queries. In T. Andreasen, H. Christiansen, & H.L. Larsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the third international conference on flexible query answering systems (13 – 15 May 1998). Lecture notes in computer science, (Vol. 1495, 164–175). London: Springer-Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garofalakis, M., & Kumar, A. (2003). Correlating XML data streams using tree-edit distance embeddings. In PODS ’03: Proceedings of the twenty-second ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on principles of database systems (pp. 143–154). New York: ACM.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kacprzyk, J., & Ziolkowski, A. (1986). Database queries with fuzzy linguistic quantifiers. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 16(3), 474–479.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klir, G. J., & Yuan, B. (1995). Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic: Theory and applications. New York: Prentice-Hall.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Levenshtein, V. I. (1966). Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions and reversals. Soviet Physics-Doklady, 10, 707–710.

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Li, H. G., Aghili, S. A., Agrawal, D., & Abbadi, A. E. (2006). FLUX: Fuzzy content and structure matching of XML range queries. In Proceedings of WWW 2006, May 23-26, 2006. Edinburgh, Scotland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loiseau, Y., Prade, H., & Boughanem, M. (2004). Qualitative pattern matching with linguistic terms. AI Communications, 17(1), 25–34.

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Mandreoli, F., Martoglia, R., & Tiberio, P. (2004). Approximate query answering for a heterogeneous XML document base. In Springer (Ed.), Proceedings of the 5th int. conf on web information systems engineering. Brisbane, Australia, November 22–24.

  • Mouchaweh, M. S. (2004). Diagnosis in real time for evolutionary processes in using pattern recognition and possibility theory (invited paper). International Journal of Computational Cognition, 2(1), 79–112. ISSN 1542–5908.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nierman, A., & Jagadish, H. V. (2002). Evaluating structural similarity in XML documents. In Int’l workshop on the web and databases (WebDB). Madison,WI, 2002 June. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/nierman02evaluating.html.

  • Reis, D. C., Golgher, P. B., Silva, A. S., & Laender, A. F. (2004). Automatic web news extraction using tree edit distance. In WWW ’04: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on world wide web (pp. 502–511). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Schlieder, T. (2002). Schema-driven evaluation of approximate tree-pattern queries. In Proceedings EDBT (pp. 514–532). Prague, Czech Republic. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/schlieder02schemadriven.html

  • W3C (1999). XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.

  • Yu, C., & Jagadish, H. V. (2006). XML schema summarization. In U. Dayal, K. Whang, D. Lomet, G. Alonso, G. Lohman, M. Kersten, S. K. Cha, & Y. Kim, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd international Conference on very large data bases (Seoul, Korea, September 12 – 15, 2006). Very large data bases. VLDB endowment (pp. 319–330).

  • Zadeh, L. (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and Control, 8(4), 338–353.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Politecnico di Milano - DEI, Piazza L. da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Alessandro Campi & Sam Guinea

  2. Università degli Studi di Milano - DTI, via Bramante 65, 26013, Crema, Cremona, Italy

    Ernesto Damiani & Stefania Marrara

  3. Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca - DISCO, Viale Sarca 336, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Gabriella Pasi

  4. Università degli Studi Insubria di Como - DSCPI, Via Valleggio, 11, 22100, Como, Italy

    Paola Spoletini

Authors
  1. Alessandro Campi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ernesto Damiani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Sam Guinea
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Stefania Marrara
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Gabriella Pasi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Paola Spoletini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stefania Marrara.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Campi, A., Damiani, E., Guinea, S. et al. A fuzzy extension of the XPath query language. J Intell Inf Syst 33, 285–305 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-008-0066-3

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-008-0066-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation