New system to fingerprint extensible markup language documents using winnowing theory

Today, with the fast development of extensible markup language (XML) and increasing amount of data that is published in the form of XML, copyright protection of these data is becoming an important requirement for numerous applications. This study is proposing a system that uses fingerprinting to trace illegal copies and detect any modification made to an XML data. However, the flexible construction of XML data poses a number of challenges to fingerprinting, such as reorganisation and alteration. To overcome these challenges, the proposed system has to be based on the winnowing theory, which selects fingerprint from hashes of XML elements. This system is distortion free since it does not introduce any deformation to the XML data and also preserves usability constraint that is not optimised by the current fingerprinting systems. Experimental results show that the probability of missing fingerprint matching is very low and the chance to detect and locate changes in the XML data is very high.