Structural XML Query Processing

Since the boom in new proposals on techniques for efficient querying of XML data is now over and the research world has shifted its attention toward new types of data formats, we believe that it is crucial to review what has been done in the area to help users choose an appropriate strategy and scientists exploit the contributions in new areas of data processing. The aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive study of the state-of-the-art of approaches for the structural querying of XML data. In particular, we start with a description of labeling schemas to capture the structure of the data and the respective storage strategies. Then we deal with the key part of every XML query processing: a twig query join, XML query algebras, optimizations of query plans, and selectivity estimation of XML queries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides such a detailed description of XML query processing techniques that are related to structural aspects and that contains information about their theoretical and practical features as well as about their mutual compatibility and general usability.