DTD-Miner: a tool for mining DTD from XML documents

Abstract

XML documents are semi-structured and the structure of the documents is embedded in the tags. Although XML documents can be accompanied by a document type definition (DTD) that defines the structure of the documents, the presence of a DTD is not mandatory. The difficulty in deriving the DTD for XML documents lies in the fact that DTDs are of a different syntax from XML and that prior knowledge of the structure of the documents is required. In this paper, we introduce DTD-Miner, an automatic structure mining tool for XML documents. Using a Web-based interface, the user is able to submit a set of similarly structured XML documents and the system automatically suggests a DTD. The user is also able to further refine the DTD generated to reduce the complexity by relaxing some the rules used in the system.