Data Mining for XML Query-Answering Support

Extracting information from semistructured documents is a very hard task, and is going to become more and more critical as the amount of digital information available on the Internet grows. Indeed, documents are often so large that the data set returned as answer to a query may be too big to convey interpretable knowledge. In this paper, we describe an approach based on Tree-Based Association Rules (TARs): mined rules, which provide approximate, intensional information on both the structure and the contents of Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents, and can be stored in XML format as well. This mined knowledge is later used to provide: 1) a concise idea—the gist—of both the structure and the content of the XML document and 2) quick, approximate answers to queries. In this paper, we focus on the second feature. A prototype system and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.