A Crowdsourcing-based Approach for Efficient XML Keyword Search

XML keyword search, due to its importance and applicability, is known as a well-attentioned topic in the context of XML (query) processing. Over the years, many different approaches have been proposed in order to perform the process in an effective way. The analysis of the literature in this field addresses the lack of benefiting users' potential and capabilities to improve the process. However, there are some user-centric studies that incorporated users in the process in some way; to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is not any focused research work the respected literature that leverages human computation ability in this regard. On the other side, taking advantages of humans computing and processing abilities is currently known as a well-experienced strategy to solve computing problems in different contexts. Specifically, in the field of database and query processing there are several seminal works that leveraged users' participation in order to improve the process. Following such an idea, in this paper a crowdsourcing-based XML keyword searching approach is proposed. In addition to explaining the conceptual architecture and details of different parts of the proposed approach, the efficiency of the introduced approach is proved through conducting some experiments. The authors believe that the presented solution, as the first step, can provide a roadmap for the future works in the field.