A Similarity-based Approach to Match Elements Across Versions of XML Documents

XML documents are often used to provide inter-system interoperability. A related problem is that XML documents evolve over time, so identifying and understanding the changes they undergo become crucial. Some diff approaches based on syntactic and semantic analysis of the documents have been developed to address this problem. The strategy is to find data fragments that are identical in both versions of an XML document and match the corresponding elements through the use of context keys. However, depending on how XML documents are managed, there is no guarantee that the values of these keys remain the same across versions. Thus, differently from existing approaches, this paper proposes the use of similarity to match corresponding elements across XML versions, rather than key equality. It also shows how this can be applied to support both syntactic and semantic XML diff applications.