Representative objects: Concise representations of semistructured, hierarchical data

In this paper we introduce the representative object, which uncovers the inherent schema(s) in semistructured, hierarchical data sources and provides a concise description of the structure of the data. Semistructured data, unlike data stored in typical relational or object-oriented databases, does not have fixed schema that is known in advance and stored separately from the data. Withthe rapid growth of the World Wide Web, semistructured hierarchical data sources are becoming widely available to the casual user. The lack of external schema information currently makes browsing and querying these data sources inefficient at best, and impossible at worst. We show how representative objects make schema discovery efficient and facilitate the generation of meaningful queries over the data. 1.