Naming in XML Documents

XML is now an established standard for data communication and representation. There has been considerable work on XML querying, modeling, and type definition. However, one of the most important aspects of XML, standardized tag naming for conveying semantics, has been almost ignored by the research community. This paper argues that the naming aspects of XML are important to consider and presents a naming methodology for XML tags that captures increased context information. Using semantic tag names opens up the possibility of semantic querying of XML documents, which simplifies query formulation by reducing the reliance on path expressions. A semantic query facility allows XML documents with similar semantics, but organized using different DTDs, to be queried without modifying the original query formulation. Finally, we demonstrate an algorithm for converting semantic queries to structural queries by disambiguating incomplete path expressions.