Efficient XML Keyword Search

Abstract

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a semi structured text format which was designed to describe the data using custom tags. Custom tag makes an XML document self-describing so that it is easily understandable by human and machine. XML is now a standard format of data exchange between applications and used in configuration files of enterprise applications. The increasing preference to store and transmit data in the XML format has led to a need for searching these xml documents to retrieve useful information. Xpath and XQuery are powerful structured languages that are used to retrieve information from xml document. But these query languages are complex for non expert user to learn. Complex formats of query language restrict the usage of the xml database. Keyword search allows such user to retrieve information without understanding syntax of complex query language or schema of database. Along with the ease of retrieval of information, keyword search has some challenges like meaningful results, intension of search, keyword ambiguity, enormous results etc. This paper presents efficient keyword search method based on clustering and relevance ranking. Experiment has been conducted to show effectiveness of the proposed method.