Design and Evaluation of an Example-based Graphical Manipulation Framework for XML

This paper explains a novel manipulation framework for XML. The key idea is to choose some example XML elements existing in the database and show the system how to manipulate them. The system then infers how to manipulate the whole collection of XML documents. The framework is unique in that while other approaches require users to write (or draw) explicit query specifications in their own query languages, ours needs implicit specifications through example operations. The problem is challenging, because XML documents can be semistructured data and inferring the intended operation is not trivial. Our algorithm is based on tree-style object modeling and path-expressions with wildcards to infer the user’s intention. The paper presents the object modeling, its inference mechanism, and some results of our preliminary experiments. 1