Change detection and maintenance of an XML web warehouse

Abstract

The World Wide Web is a popular broadcast medium that contains a huge amount of information. The web warehouse is an efficient and effective means to facilitate utilization of information on the Web. XML has become the new standard for semi-structured data exchange over the Web. In this paper, therefore, we study the XML web warehouse and propose an approach to the problems of change detection and warehouse maintenance in an XML web warehouse system. This paper has three major contributions. First, we propose an object-oriented data model for XML web pages in the web warehouse as well as system architecture for change detection and warehouse maintenance. Second, we propose a change detection method based on mobile agent technology to actively detect changes of data sources of the web warehouse. Third, we propose an incremental and deferred maintenance method to maintain XML web pages in the web warehouse. We compared our approach with a rewriting approach to storage and maintenance of the XML web warehouse by experiments. Performance evaluation shows that our approach is more efficient than the rewriting approach in terms of the response time and storage space of the web warehouse.