Efficient indexing technique for XML-based electronic product catalogs

Electronic product catalogs are considered as one of the main components of e-commerce applications. Efficient processing of queries on product catalogs is important for customer satisfaction. In this paper, we present an indexing structure for processing queries efficiently on natively stored XML-based electronic product catalogs. We also present the performance comparison of our index structure with two alternative approaches. The first is the extended inverted index technique, used in information retrieval and also in product catalogs. The second is the traditional way of traversing the entire XML document for query processing via SAX. The research done in the literature on efficient storage structure for XML is on generic XML documents. In this paper, we focus on efficient index structures for XML-based product catalogs considering their specific needs and properties.