Issues in Personalized Access to Multi-Version XML Documents

In several application fields including legal and medical domains, XML documents are “versioned” along different dimensions of interest, whose nature depends on the application needs such as time, space and security. Specifically, temporal and semantic versioning is particularly demanding in a broad range of application domains where temporal versioning can be used to maintain histories of the underlying resources along various time dimensions, and semantic versioning can then be used to model limited applicability of resources to individual cases or contexts. The selection and reconstruction of the version(s) of interest for a user means the retrieval of those fragments of documents that match both the implicit and explicit user needs, which can be formalized as what we call personalization queries. In this chapter, we focus on the design and implementation issues of a personalization query processor. We consider different design options and, among them, we introduce an in-depth study of a native solution by showing, also through experimental evaluation, how some of the best performing technological solutions available today for XML data management can be successfully extended and optimally combined in order to support personalization queries.