VTracker: domain-independent and domain-aware XML-document differencing

XML，即可扩展标记语言，是现代信息系统、面向服务的体系结构（SOA）和语义网的标准交换格式。因此，比较XML文档已成为跟踪和合并同一文档版本之间的更改的必要任务，或者在引用相同信息但遵循不同模式或来自不同方的文档之间进行翻译。在此场景中，给定两个文档，XML差异是查找编辑序列的过程，即精确和近似匹配、删除和插入操作的序列，如果将其应用于第一个文档，将导致第二个文档。在实践中，特定于领域的差异解决方案的开发成本很高，而且难以重用。因此，一种能够服务于不同领域的通用区分方法既有用又具有成本效益。

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is the standard exchange format for modern Information Systems, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the Semantic Web. Hence, comparing XML documents has become a necessary task for tracking and merging changes between versions of the same document, or for translating between documents referring to the same information but complying with different schemata or originating from different parties. In this scenario, given two documents, XML differencing is the process of finding an edit sequence, namely a sequence of exact and approximate matching, deletion, and insertion operations, which, if applied to the first document will result in the second. In practice, domain-specific differencing solutions are expensive to develop, and hard to reuse. Therefore, a generic differencing approach, able to serve various domains, would be both useful and cost-effective.