EFFICIENT QUERYING OF TRANSFORMED XML DOCUMENTS
Sven Groppe, Stefan Böttcher, Georg Birkenheuer · 2004
An application using XML for data representation requires the transformation of XML data if the application accesses XML data of other applications, or of a global database using another XML format. The common approach transforms entire XML documents from one format into another e.g. by using an XSLT stylesheet. The application can then work locally on a copy of the original document transformed in the application-specific format. Different from the common approach, we use an XSLT stylesheet in order to transform a given XPath query such that we retrieve and transform only that part of the XML document which is sufficient to answer the given query. Among other things, our approach avoids problems of replication, saves processing time and in distributed scenarios, transportation costs. Experimental results of a prototype prove that our approach is scalable and efficient.