An XML distance measure

Distance measures are used extensively in data mining and other types of data analysis. Such measures assume it is possible to compute for each pair of domain objects their mutual distance. Much of the research in distance measures concentrates on objects either in attribute-value representation or in first-order representation. With the increasing use of XML technology as a means for unambiguous exchange of information, more and more data come in the form of XML documents. In this paper, we present a distance measure between two objects in terms of their XML representation. This measure views an XML object as a tree in which an XML element is a node. It recursively computes the overall distance between two XML trees from root nodes to leaf nodes. Accordingly, this measure can be applied in any domain as long as the object of that domain can be provided with a uniform XML representation.