Representative objects: concise representations of semistructured, hierarchical data

TLDR

Semi‑structured hierarchical data lacks a fixed schema, and the rapid growth of web‑based sources makes browsing and querying inefficient without external schema information. The paper proposes representative objects to uncover inherent schemas and give concise descriptions of semi‑structured hierarchical data. Representative objects are defined to automatically discover the underlying schema(s) and summarize the structure of semi‑structured hierarchical data. Representative objects enable efficient schema discovery and support the creation of meaningful queries.

Abstract

Introduces the concept of representative objects, which uncover the inherent schema(s) in semi-structured, hierarchical data sources and provide a concise description of the structure of the data. Semi-structured data, unlike data stored in typical relational or object-oriented databases, does not have a fixed schema that is known in advance and stored separately from the data. With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, semi-structured hierarchical data sources are becoming widely available to the casual user. The lack of external schema information currently makes browsing and querying these data sources inefficient at best, and impossible at worst. We show how representative objects make schema discovery efficient and facilitate the generation of meaningful queries over the data.