Regular Papers Efficient Xml Tree Pattern Query Evaluation Using A Novel One-Phase Holistic Twig Join Scheme

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide an efficient algorithm for Extensible Markup Language (XML) twig query evaluation.Design/methodology/approach - A single-phase holistic twig pattern matching method based on the TwigStack algorithm is proposed. The method applies a novel stack structure to preserve the holisticity of the twig matches. Twig matches rooted at elements that are currently in the root stack are output directly.Findings - Without generating individual path matches as intermediate results, the method is able to avoid the storage and output/input of the individual path matches, and totally eliminate the potentially time-consuming merging operation. Experimental results demonstrate the applicability and advantages of our approach.Originality/value - The paper proposes an efficient XML twig query evaluation algorithm, which by both theoretical analyses and empirical studies demonstrates its advantages over the current state-of-the-art algorithm TwigStack.