Review - XTRACT: A System for Extracting Document Type Descriptors from XML Documents.
Gerhard Weikum:
Review - XTRACT: A System for Extracting Document Type Descriptors from XML Documents.
ACM SIGMOD Digital Review 2: (2000) BibTeX
Review
The paper describes the architecture of XTRACT, a system for inferring an accurate, meaningful, near optimal DTD schema for a repository of XML documents. The paper presents some very interesting ideas on an important and challenging subject.
The XTRACT system executes three steps:
- Generalization (finding patterns in the input sequences and
replacing them with regular expressions to generate general
candidate DTDs)
- Factoring (factoring candidate DTDs using adaptions of
algorithms for the optimization of Boolean functions)
- applying MDL principle (applying the Minimum Description Length
principle to find the near optimal DTD among the candidates).
The authors provide experimental results in comparison with
DDbE (Data Description by Example generated by IBM alphaworks(R))
The paper's key contribution lies in applying the MDL principle for
defining an information-theoretic measure to quantify and
resolve the tradeoff between the conciseness and
precision of DTDs. This is indeed a reasonable and intriguing
first cut on this difficult problem, but I am not fully convinced
that this should be the bottom line. It could well be that
conciseness by general regular expressions may reduce the
readability and intuitiveness of a DTD. But this paper should be an
excellent starting point for more intensive work along these lines.
Copyright © 2000 by the author(s).
Review published with permission.
References
- [1]
- Minos N. Garofalakis, Aristides Gionis, Rajeev Rastogi, S. Seshadri, Kyuseok Shim:
XTRACT: A System for Extracting Document Type Descriptors from XML Documents.
SIGMOD Conference 2000: 165-176 BibTeX
BibTeX
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