XML-OLAP: A Multidimensional Analysis Framework for XML Warehouses

Recently, a large number of XML documents are available on the Internet. This trend motivated many researchers to analyze them multi-dimensionally in the same way as relational data. In this paper, we propose a new framework for multidimensional analysis of XML documents, which we call XML-OLAP. We base XML-OLAP on XML warehouses where every fact data as well as dimension data are stored as XML documents. We build XML cubes from XML warehouses. We propose a new multidimensional expression language for XML cubes, which we call XML-MDX. XML-MDX statements target XML cubes and use XQuery expressions to designate the measure data. They specify text mining operators for aggregating text constituting the measure data. We evaluate XML-OLAP by applying it to a U.S. patent XML warehouse. We use XML-MDX queries, which demonstrate that XML-OLAP is effective for multi-dimensionally analyzing the U.S. patents.