An encoding scheme based on fractional number for querying and updating XML data

In order to facilitate the XML query processing, several labeling schemes have been proposed to directly determine the structural relationships between two arbitrary XML nodes without accessing the original XML documents. However, the existing XML labeling schemes have to re-label the pre-existing nodes or re-calculate the label values when a new node is inserted into the XML document during an update process. In this paper, we devise a novel encoding scheme based on the fractional number to encode the labels of the XML nodes. Moreover, we propose a mapping method to convert our proposed fractional number based encoding scheme to bit string based encoding scheme with the intention to minimize the label size and save the storage space. By applying our proposed bit string encoding scheme to the range-based labeling scheme and the prefix labeling scheme, the process of re-labeling the pre-existing nodes can be avoided when nodes are inserted as leaf nodes and sibling nodes without affecting the order of XML nodes. In addition, we propose an algorithm to control the increment of label size when new nodes are inserted frequently at a fix place of an XML tree. Experimental results show that our proposed bit string encoding scheme provides efficient support to the process of XML updating without sacrificing the query performance when it is applied to the range-based labeling schemes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.