TOSS: an extension of TAX with ontologies and similarity queries

TAX is perhaps the best known extension of the relational algebra to handle queries to XML databases. One problem with TAX (as with many existing relational DBMSs) is that the semantics of terms in a TAX DB are not taken into account when answering queries. Thus, even though TAX answers queries with 100% precision, the recall of TAX is relatively low. Our TOSS system improves the recall of TAX via the concept of a similarity enhanced ontology (SEO). Intuitively, an ontology is a set of graphs describing relationships (such as isa, partof, etc.) between terms in a DB. An SEO also evaluates how similarities between terms (e.g. "J. Ullman", "Jeff Ullman", and "Jeffrey Ullman") affect ontologies. Finally, we show how the algebra proposed in TAX can be extended to take SEOs into account. The result is a system that provides a much higher answer quality than TAX does alone (quality is defined as the square root of the product of precision and recall). We experimentally evaluate the TOSS system on the DBLP and SIGMOD bibliographic databases and show that TOSS has acceptable performance.