Structure-Preserving Difference Search for XML Documents

Current XML differencing applications usually try to find a minimal sequence of edit operations that transform one XML document to another XML document (the so-called "edit script"). In our conviction, this approach often produces increments that are unintuitive for human readers and do not reflect the actual changes. We therefore propose in this article a different approach trying to maximise the retained structure instead of minimising the edit sequence. Structure is thereby not limited to the usual tree structure of XML any kind of structural relations can be considered (like parent-child, ancestor-descendant, sibling, document order). In our opinion, this approach is very flexible and able to adapt to the user's requirements. It produces more readable results while still retaining a reasonably small edit sequence. Structure-Preserving Difference Search for XML Documents