Transforming data-centric eXtensible markup language into relational databases using hybrid approach

Abstract

eXtensible markup language (XML) appeared internationally as the format for data representation over the web. Yet, most organizations are still utilising relational databases as their database solutions. As such, it is crucial to provide seamless integration via effective transformation between these database infrastructures. In this paper, we propose XML-REG to bridge these two technologies based on node-based and path-based approaches. The node-based approach is good to annotate each positional node uniquely, while the path-based approach provides summarised path information to join the nodes. On top of that, a new range labelling is also proposed to annotate nodes uniquely by ensuring the structural relationships are maintained between nodes. If a new node is to be added to the document, re-labelling is not required as the new label will be assigned to the node via the new proposed labelling scheme. Experimental evaluations indicated that the performance of XML-REG exceeded XMap, XRecursive, XAncestor and Mini-XML concerning storing time, query retrieval time and scalability. This research produces a core framework for XML to relational databases (RDB) mapping, which could be adopted in various industries.