A Scheme of Automated Object and Facet Extraction for Faceted Search over XML Data

Applying faceted search for XML data enables users to search XML data in an interactive manner. However, applying faceted search is challenging, because faceted search requires target subtrees (objects) and facets to be defined beforehand. To this problem, existing works assume that such objects and/or facets are defined manually, but it is infeasible to manually specify objects and facets in particular when the XML data are huge and/or its structure is quite complicated. To address this problem, this paper proposes an automatic extraction scheme of objects and facets from XML data. We propose two approaches, namely frequency-based approach and semantic-based approach, and also hybrid approach of them. The basic ideas of these approaches are that the frequently occurring XML elements seem to be objects and facets, and such XML elements may have semantically meaningful name. Although the proposed approaches are rather simple, the experiments using real world XML data show that the proposed approaches can automatically extract objects and facets from the XML data.