• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.513-525
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• 2006

Search results of XML keyword search are defined generally as the most specific elements containing all query keywords in the literature. The labels of XML elements and semantic information such as ontology, conceptual model, thesaurus, and so on, are used to improve the preciseness of the search results. This paper presents a hierarchical index for an efficient XML keyword query processing on the condition that returnable search concepts are defined and users' query concepts can be interpreted with the help of the semantic information. The hierarchical index separately stores the XML elements containing a keyword on the basis of the hierarchical relations of the concepts that the XML elements belong to, and makes it possible to obtain least common ancestors, which are candidates for the search results, with selectively reading the elements belonging to the concepts relevant to query concepts and without considering all the combinations of the elements having been read. This paper deals with how to organize the hierarchical index and how to process XML keyword queries with the index. In our experiment with the DBLP XML document and the XML documents in the INEX2003 test set, the hierarchical index worked well.