An XSLT transformation method for distributed XML

Recently, the sizes of XML documents have rapidly been increasing. Distributed XML is a novel form of XML document, in which an XML document is partitioned into fragments and managed separately in plural sites. Distributed XML documents can often be managed more easily than a single large document, due to geographical and/or administrative factors. In this paper, we propose a method for performing XSLT transformation efficiently for distributed XML documents. We assume that the expressive power of XSLT is restricted to an extended version of unranked top-down tree transducer. Our basic strategy is to transform all the XML fragments in parallel. We implemented our method in Ruby and made evaluation experiments. This result suggests that our method is more efficient than a centralized approach.