Abstract
Current XML differencing applications usually try to find a minimal sequence of edit operations that transform one XML document to another XML docum ent (the so-called "edit script"). In our conviction, this approach often produces increments that are unintuitive for human readers and do not reflect the actual changes. We therefore propose in this article a different approach trying to maximise the retained structure instead of minimising the edit sequence. Structure is thereby not limited to the usual tree structure of XML - any kind of structural relations can be considered (like parent-child, ancestor-descendant, sibling, document order). In our opinion, this approach is very flexible and able to adapt to the user's requirements. It produces more readable results while still retaining a reasonably small edit sequence.

URL:
http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-RP-2005-45

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{REWERSE-RP-2005-45,
	author = {Erich Schubert and Sebastian Schaffert and Fran\c{c}ois Bry},
	title = {Structure-Preserving Difference Search for XML Documents},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of Extreme Markup Languages 2005, Montréal, Québec, Canada (1st--5th August 2005)},
	year = {2005},
	url = {http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-RP-2005-45}
}