QED: a novel quaternary encoding to completely avoid re-labeling in XML updates

The method of assigning labels to the nodes of the XML tree is called a labeling scheme. Based on the labels only, both ordered and un-ordered queries can be processed without accessing the original XML file. One more important point for the labeling scheme is the label update cost in inserting or deleting a node into or from the XML tree. All the current labeling schemes have high update cost, therefore in this paper we propose a novel quaternary encoding approach for the labeling schemes. Based on this encoding approach, we need not re-label any existing nodes when the update is performed. Extensive experimental results on the XML datasets illustrate that our QED works much better than the existing labeling schemes on the label updates when considering either the number of nodes or the time for re-labeling.