Efficient Filtering of XML Documents for Selective Dissemination of Information

Information Dissemination applications are gaining increasing popularity due to dramatic improvements in communications bandwidth and ubiquity. The sheer volume of data available necessitates the use of selective approaches to dissemination in order to avoid overwhelming users with unnecessaryinformation. Existing mechanisms for selective dissemination typically rely on simple keyword matching or “bag of words” information retrieval techniques. The advent of XML as a standard for information exchangeand the development of query languages for XML data enables the development of more sophisticated filtering mechanisms that take structure information into account. We have developed several index organizations and search algorithms for performing efficient filtering of XML documents for large-scale information dissemination systems. In this paper we describe these techniques and examine their performance across a range of document, workload, and scale scenarios.