Customizable Detection of Changes for XML Documents using XPath Expressions

Change detection in XML documents is an important task in the context of query systems. In this paper, we present CustX-Diff, a customizable change detection approach for XML documents based on X-Diff. CustX-Diff performs the change detection operation simultaneously with the XPath based filtering of XML document parts. The class of XPath expressions used is the tree patterns subset of XPath. For the embedding of simple paths into XPath expressions during the difference operation, a dynamic programming approach is proposed. Comparative performance results with respect to the original X-Diff approach demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.