Conclusions and Future Work

We have presented an implementation of a fuzzy version of XPath by using an XQuery library. Fuzzy XPath incorporates mechanisms to rank answers depending on the location of the item in the XML tree of input, as well as to give priority to queries. The output of a query contains a RSV in each item according to the user’s preferences. We have described the elements of the XQuery library that make possible to express fuzzy queries against crisp XML data. As future work, we plan the following steps. Firstly, to incorporate new mechanisms of searching and ranking to queries. We have previously studied [3, 4] how to penalize answers when a given XPath expression is incorrect, and tags have to be jumped, switched and added. We believe that these mechanisms can be implemented also in XQuery. Secondly, we would like to extend our work to other fuzzy logic mechanism (vagueness, similarity, etc). Finally, we would like to improve the performance of our implementation, for instance, in the use of thresholding. Up to now, thresholding is achieved on the output of the query, and dynamic thresholding would improve the performance.