Unification of XML DTD for XML documents with similar structure

Abstract

There are many cases that XML documents have different DTDs in spite of having a similar structure and being logically the same kind of document. For this reason, a problem may occur in which these XML documents will have different database schema and are stored in different databases, and we have to access all database that is concerned to process the queries of users. Consequently, it decreases seriously the efficiency of retrieval. To solve this problem, we propose an algorithm that unifies DTDs of these XML documents using the finite automata and the tree structure. The finite automata are suitable for representing repetition operators and connectors of DTD, and are simple representation method for DTD. By using the finite automata, we are able to reduce the complexity of algorithm. And we apply a proposed algorithm to unify DTDs of science journals. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.