XChange

XML documents are increasingly being used to allow data interchange among sys-tems. A related problem is that XML documents evolve over time, so identifying and under-standing these changes becomes fundamental. However, existing approaches related to under-standing changes (diff) in XML documents are focused only on syntactic changes. This means that these approaches compare XML documents based on their structures, without considering the associated semantics. For large XML documents, which have undergone many changes from a version to the next, fewer semantic changes might encompass many syntactic changes. This feature has the potential to ease the understanding of changes in XML documents.

Thus, this proposal presents the XChange approach to provide support for diff of XML documents considering the semantic of the changes. For such, the granular syntactic changes in attributes and elements are analyzed by means of inference rules. This analysis identifies sets of syntac-tic changes that can be combined into semantic changes. Thus, differently from existing ap-proaches, XChange proposes the use of syntactic changes in versions of an XML document as a means to infer the real reason for the change and support the process of semantic diff. In order to ensure the correct functioning of the semantic diff, it is important to evaluate the quality of the matching among elements.

The experimental results show that XChange was able to provide equivalent precision results, with only a fraction of the time needed by a state-of-the-art approach, being a more efficient approach. Furthermore, the results show that XChange presents higher efficacy and efficiency in understanding changes between versions of XML documents, when compared to a state-of-the-art approach.

Team

• Alessandreia Marta de Oliveira Julio (UFF)
• Leonardo Gresta Paulino Murta (UFF)
• Vanessa Braganholo Murta (UFF)

Datasets

• Baltimore

Experiments

• RQ1 - Effectiveness - Does XChange’s semantic change identification allow users to be more effective in understanding the XML document evolution when compared to using X-Diff’s syntactic changes identification?

• RQ2 - Efficiency - Does XChange’s semantic change identification allow users to be more efficient in understanding the XML document evolution when compared to using X-Diff’s syntactic changes identification?

• Mean and standard deviation of the participant’s answers

Publications

• Thesis

• OLIVEIRA, ALESSANDREIA; TESSAROLLI, GABRIEL ; GHIOTTO, GLEIPH ; PINTO, BRUNO ; CAMPELLO, FERNANDO ; MARQUES, MATHEUS ; OLIVEIRA, CARLOS ; RODRIGUES, IGOR ; KALINOWSKI, MARCOS ; SOUZA, UÉVERTON ; MURTA, Leonardo ; BRAGANHOLO, VANESSA . An efficient similarity-based approach for comparing XML documents. INFORMATION SYSTEMS, v. 78, p. 40-57, 2018.

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