XPC: A novel method for retrieving massive smallscale XML documents via path constraints

This paper proposes a novel method for searching massive and small-scale XML documents via path constraints, referred to as XPC, to overcome drawbacks of conventional approaches. Firstly, we propose employing keywords with simple path constraints to retrieve XML data, which provides a user-friendly way without need of understanding complex knowledge and could express user demand accurately. This paper further proposes a novel method for computing term weight in documents via path constraints, called rtf-idf. It measures the similarity of path constraints by N-Gram and other factors according to the structure of the XML documents. Then we rank the relevant documents by an extension of the vector space model. The experimental results show that XPC indeed outperforms the baseline methods such as VSM in plain text and JuruXML.