An overview on XML similarity: Background, current trends and future directions

In recent years, XML has been established as a major means for information management, and has been broadly utilized for complex data representation (e.g. multimedia objects). Owing to an unparalleled increasing use of the XML standard, developing efficient techniques for comparing XML-based documents becomes essential in the database and information retrieval communities. In this paper, we provide an overview of XML similarity/comparison by presenting existing research related to XML similarity. We also detail the possible applications of XML comparison processes in various fields, ranging over data warehousing, data integration, classification/clustering and XML querying, and discuss some required and emergent future research directions.