A comparative study for XML change detection

Change detection is an important part of version management for databases and document archives. The success of XML has recently renewed interest in change detection on trees and semi-structured data, and various algorithms have been proposed. We study here different algorithms and representations of changes based on their formal definition and on experiments conducted over XML data from the Web. Our goal is to provide an evaluation of (i) the quality of the results (ii) the performance of the tools. We also consider in which context each of these algorithms can be best used.