Fragmentation of XML Documents Hui Ma and Klaus-Dieter Schewe   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Mobile and Distributed Systems Abstract The world-wide web (WWW) is often considered to be the world's largest database and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is then considered to provide its datamodel. Adopting this view we have to deal with a distributed database. This raises the question, how to obtain a suitable distribution design for XML documents. In this paper horizontal and vertical fragmentation techniques are generalised from the relational datamodel to XML. Furthermore, splitting will be introduced as a third kind of fragmentation. Then it is shown how relational techniques for defining reasonable fragments can be applied to the case of XML. ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery