Discover semantics from XML

Abstract

In database applications the availability of a conceptual schema of semantics constitute invaluable leverage for improving the effectiveness, and sometimes the efficiency, of many tasks including query processing, keyword search and schema and data integration. The Object-Relationship-Attribute model for Semi-Structured data (ORA-SS) is specifically intended to capture the semantics of object classes, object identifiers, relationship types, object attributes and relationship attributes underlying XML schemas and data. We refer to these semantic concepts as the ORA-semantics. We are interested, in this thesis, in the automatically discovering of the ORA-semantics from existing XML data and schemas. In this thesis, we present a novel approach to automatically discover the ORA-semantics from XML schemas and XML data. The approach we proposed is based on properties of the semantic concepts, heuristics and data mining techniques that identify the different semantic concepts. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the effectiveness of the approach.