A Framework of Summarizing XML Documents with Schemas

Abstract: eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become one of the de facto standards of data exchange and representation in many applications. An XML document is usually too complex and large to understand and use for a human being. A summarized XML document of the original document is useful in such cases. Three standards are given to evaluate the final summarized XML document: document size, information content, and information importance. A framework of summarizing an XML document based both on the document itself and the schema is given, which applies schema to summarize XML documents because there are many important semantic and structural information implied by the schema. In our framework, redundant data are first removed by abnormal functional dependencies and schema structure. Then tags and values of the XML document are summarized based on the document itself and schema. Our framework is a semi-automatic approach which can help users to summarize an XML document in the sense that some parameters must be specified by the users. Experiments show that the framework can make the summarized XML document has a good balance of document size, information content, and information importance comparing with the original one.