A first step for building a document warehouse: Unification of XML documents

The Web plays a key role for information publication and exchange between organizations. In this context, the XML format becomes a common standard for data representation and exchange. On the other hand, XML documents constitute an important source for decisional analyses since they help decision makers to better understand and control the evolution of their business processes. However, even though several XML documents may belong to a same domain, they may be described by multiple structures. In this paper, we present a method to unify XML document structures in order to build a global and generic perception/view of heterogeneous documents, to store them as a document warehouse, and finally, to query them easily. We also describe our software prototype USD (Unification of Structures of XML Documents) which supports the proposed method. We illustrate its functionalities through an example.