Effective XML keyword search basing on the path semantics

Keyword search has already been a user-friendly method used to retrieve XML data. Unlike text data, XML contain rich semantics, which should be utilized to improve the quality of search results. In XML data, the same value with different semantics would have different meanings. Based on an in-depth analysis of XML structural semantics, we propose the conception of path semantics, which contains the whole semantics of the leaf value. To identify the path semantics, we measure the remarkableness of the path to XML documents and the relevant between the leaf values and the path. Then, we design the ranking strategy for XML keyword search. Final experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed ranking schema. © 2013 by Binary Information Press.