MAJORITY SCHEMA IN SEMI-STRUCTURED DATA

A schema discovery system and associated method discover a majority schema for a set of related and similarly marked up documents, such as HTML documents, based on the assumption that though the structure of these documents is mostly for visual purposes, the keywords used in the documents along with the structural tags provide some hints, and allow a rough sketch of the underlying intended schema. With the assumption that albeit the set of HTML documents are marked up differently due to diverse authoring skills, they are closely related in content, it is reasonable to find a schema that can unify these different schemas, which schema is shared by the majority of these HTML documents. The system employs constraint rules on tree ordering to reduce the computational complexity in arriving at optimized XML DTD schema. These generalized XML DTD schemas may be used to perform automated comparison and evaluation schemes of profile documents on the WWW.