Efficient creation and incremental maintenance of the HOPI index for complex XML document collections Ralf Schenkel, Anja Theobald, and Gerhard Weikum   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Research Session 11: XML Indexing and Dissemination Abstract The HOPI index, a connection index for XML documents based on the concept of a 2-hop cover, provides space- and time-efficient reachability tests along the ancestor, descendant, and link axes to support path expressions with wildcards in XML search engines. This paper presents enhanced algorithms for building HOPI, shows how to augment the index with distance information, and discusses incremental index maintenance. Our experiments show substantial improvements over the existing divide-and-conquer algorithm for index creation, low space overhead for including distance information in the index, and efficient updates. ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery