An encoding scheme for indexing XML data

E-services are becoming a promising technology for the effective automation of application integration across the Web. They build upon XML, as data format for exchanging messages between applications. Accompanied with WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP, XML has clearly influenced positively the development of applications running on the Web. As the basic technology, indexing scheme for XML data have been studied in recent years to optimize path query processing by summarizing path information. However, most of these schemes based on tree traversals may not meet the processing requirements under heavy access requests. In this paper, we proposed a new scheme for indexing XML data using encoding elements, termed ES-index, and its algorithms. This encoding scheme quickly determines the siblings-siblings and ancestor-descendant relationship in hierarchy of XML data. Our experiment results over a wide range of XML documents demonstrate that ES-index structure is efficient for data access.