Horizons for Information Societies
Seminar #6

The 6^th seminar on Horizons for Information Societies was about data processing. Dr Chbeir () presented his research on XML similarity at the (France).

See also: previous seminar (#5), next seminar (#7).

Setting

Slides of the presentation:

• Dr CHBEIR Richard:

Date: 10 May 2007 (15:00-16:00)
Location: , Tokyo, Japan
Language: English
Registration fees: None
Organization: Dr ()

Talk

XML Similarity
by Dr

Abstract: Similarity serves as an organization principle by which individuals classify objects, form concepts and make generalizations. It plays a central role in various research areas, particularly in the XML field where similarity evaluation of XML data has been receiving a lot of attention. In essence, W3C's XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) has recently gained unparalleled importance as a fundamental standard for efficient data management and exchange. Information destined to be broadcasted over the web is henceforth represented using XML, in order to guaranty its interoperability. The use of XML covers data representation and storage (e.g. complex multimedia objects), database information interchange, data filtering, as well as web services interaction. Owing to the ever-increasing abundant use of XML especially on the web, XML-based similarity/comparison becomes a central issue, specifically in the information retrieval (IR) and database (DB) communities, its applications ranging over:

• Version control, change management and data warehousing (finding, scoring and browsing changes between different versions of a document, support of temporal queries and index maintenance).
• Semi-structured data integration (measuring the similarity between XML documents in order to undertake the integration of corresponding data sources).
• Classification/clustering of XML documents gathered from the web against a set of DTDs declared in an XML database (just as schemas are necessary in traditional DBMS for the provision of efficient storage, retrieval, protection and indexing facilities, the same is true for DTDs and XML repositories).
• XML query systems (finding and ranking results according to their similarity in order to retrieve the best results possible).

In this talk, we give an overview of existing research related to XML similarity, in both its AI dynamic programming (ED-based approaches) and Information Retrieval fields. We show how:

• Most approaches in the ED literature focus exclusively on the structure of documents, ignoring the semantics involved.
• Most approaches ignore several XML similarity cases where the corresponding edit distance outcome is inaccurate.

We present our proposal and prototype aiming at both combining edit distance structural similarity computations with IR semantic similarity assessment, in an XML (structured data) context, and providing an improved fine-grained method for comparing heterogeneous XML documents.

Speaker: Dr Chbeir received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of INSA, France in 2000. He is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science in the University of Bourgogne, France. His research interests include multimedia information retrieval, distributed multimedia database management, spatio-temporal relations, access control models, bioinformatics, and the development and the integration of information systems. He is chair of ACM SIGAPP French Chapter, and member of several conference and journal program committees (EuroPar, IEEE ISSPIT, ACM ASIIS, ICIT, ACM SWS, etc.). He published in several international journals (e.g. IEEE Transactions on SMC, Journal on Data Semantics, Journal of Methods of Information in medicine) and conferences (e.g. IEEE SITIS, ACM SAC, Visual, IEEE, FLAIRS, IRMA).

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