Hubble: An advanced dynamic folder technology for XML

Abstract

A significant amount of information is stored in computer systems today, but people are struggling to manage their documents such that the information is easily found. XML is a de-facto standard for content publishing and data exchange. The proliferation of XML documents has created new challenges and opportunities for managing document collections. Existing technologies for automatically organizing document collections are either imprecise or based on only simple criteria. Since XML documents are self describing, it is now possible to automatically categorize XML documents precisely, according to their content. With the availability of the standard XML query languages, e.g. XQuery, much more powerful folder technologies are now feasible. To address this new challenge and exploit this new opportunity, this paper proposes a new and powerful dynamic folder mechanism, called Hubble. Hubble fully exploits the rich data model and semantic information embedded in the XML documents to build folder hierarchies dynamically and to categorize XML collections precisely. Besides supporting basic folder operations, Hubble also provides advanced features such as multi-path navigation and folder traversal across multiple document collections. Our performance study shows that Hubble is both efficient and scalable. Thus, it is an ideal technology for automating the process of organizing and categorizing XML documents.