Merging changes in XML documents using reliable context fingerprints

Abstract

Different dialects of XML have emerged as ubiquitous document exchange formats. For effective collaboration based on such documents, the capability to propagate edit operations performed on a document is indispensable. In order to avoid the transmission of whole documents, deltas are used to describe these edit operations, allowing the construction of a new version of a document. However, patching a document with a delta it was not generated for is error-prone, and any insert or delete operations performed on the document are likely to affect all subsequent paths within that document.In this paper, we present a delta format for XML documents that uses context-aware fingerprints to identify edit operations. This allows our XML patch procedure to find the correct position of an edit operation, even if the document was updated in the meantime. Possible conflicts are detected. Experimental results show the reliability of the presented fingerprinting technique and prove the high quality of the resulting patched documents.

A New Approach for Meaningful XML Schema Merging

“…The problem of merging XML documents using a context-aware fingerprints technique is discussed by [21]. The idea of fingerprinting the document is used in the domain of similarity search [13,22].…”

“…A change made by applying an edit operation will affect the paths of all subsequent nodes leading to non-consistent paths in the XML tree. To solve this problem, a new technique (called context fingerprints) taking into account the surrounding nodes of the edit operation is proposed by [21]. As this approach is suited to the purpose of merging XMLbased office documents, it does not fit our requirements for merging XML Schemas since it has a different delta model.…”

A Conflicts Detection Approach for Merging Formal Specification Views

“…In [13], an approach is proposed to detect the changes to XML documents. The proposed approach uses a delta that includes insertions, deletions and updates.…”

Document engineering approaches toward scalable and structured multimedia, web and printable documents

“…XML itself has been investigated in several fronts, for instance in terms of extensions that bring notions from functional programming to web authors [34], of prefiltering techniques for efficient XML document processing [17], XML query performance [29,30] and version control [27]. Extended versions of two of these works are presented in this special issue.…”