Efficient Top-k Keyword Search on XML Streams

Keywords can be used to query XML data without schema information. In this paper, a novel kind of query is proposed, top-k keyword search over XML streams. According to the set of keywords and the number of results, such query can retrieve the top-k XML data fragments most related to the keyword set. A novel ranking strategy for search result is proposed to represent the relativity of XML segments and the query. In order to efficiently and effectively process the top-k keyword query on XML streams, based on this ranking strategy, a stack-based algorithm is proposed to dynamically obtain the top-k results with the highest ranks at any time, with a filtering method to delete redundant elements. Extensive experiments are performed to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithms presented in this paper.