An index scheme for XML documents based on relationship joins

XML is rapidly emerging as a standard for information storage, representation and exchange on the web. How to rapidly search and query XML documents efficiently has received many attentions in resent research. However, current querying schemes of XML documents typically involve in both node content and tree structural information, which may limit efficiency when facing the application that the tree structural information is more complicated than the tree node itself In this paper, we propose the node, relationships joins algorithms that utilize available indexes mainly on tree structural information. The relationships join algorithms work perfectly especially for searching paths that are very long or whose lengths are unknown. Experimental results from our prototype system implementation highlight the correctness and efficiency of our solution.