Multidimensional XML file: A new XML file structure

Exchanging data between organizations becomes challenge because of differences in data formats and in the semantics of the meta-data used to describe the data. EXtensible Markup Language (XML) is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web. Querying XML data is a challenging task because of the nature of XML structure. Unlike flat files, XML documents have nested structure. Querying XML data involves not only the content but also the structure of XML data. The increasingly wider use of XML has heightened the need to store large volumes of data encoded in XML, and to query XML data more efficiently.;The way an XML document is stored in a secondary storage affects the cost of querying the data. Many techniques of storing XML data have been proposed in the literature. The main disadvantage of the existing techniques is that they organize the data in a way that will result in many disk I/Os to answer a query. In this thesis we are proposing a new multidimensional file structure to store XML data in a secondary storage. This multidimensional file structure will minimize the number of disk blocks accessed to answer a query.