Searching random XML documents

[sal achhala]

I'm working with java and XML documents in order to search for keywords in a
given element name, eg element name 'author' == "jo blogs".

The problem is the XML documents are downloaded (this process is automated)
from different websites thus the element names for author may differ!

Is their a way of dealing with this, such as perhaps a standard adopted by,
say educational websites to agree on element names ?

Thanks very much

ps im also looking for a good simple search method, by element name and also
just searching an xml document as a regular text document

 

[Martin SChukrazy]

Options
1) If you have limited number of schema (for difffering xml documents) then
you could possibly transform these documents
into your own common format and then write an xquery / xpath expression
to search for keywords in a given element
name.
2) Second option is to store all the keywords that you encounter in a
master file and then launch a process that does your
search (multi-thread for efficiency)
3) Use a comman standard in a direct format (that would mean all the
websites generate the info in a common format).
I would not be able to help without more information over here

 

[sal achhala]

1) If you have limited number of schema (for difffering xml documents)
then

you could possibly transform these documents into your own common format

and then write an xquery / xpath expression to search for keywords in a
given element name.

thanks Martin, the option above makes sense to me (im new to java/XML) - i
could transform the diffrent formats into a common one. How easy would that
be ?

The common format of my XML documents would be Date, Title, Author and
articleBody.

how would one go about transforming the documents ?

Considering element names would differ from site to site how would an
automated process recognise, for instance, that 'name' is the same as
'author' ?

thanks very much

sal

 

[Martin SChukrazy]

There are several ways to go about this...
1) Use standard Data Transformation toolkits which transform from text / xml
to a given xml format. Usually visual GUI toolkits make the job easier..
2) Use XSLT transforms to transform from one xml format to a standard xml
format

Again you can usually try GUI tools such as Stylus Studio to do the XSLT
transform and then verify the results..