Patent ID: 7440954
Filing Date: 2008-10-21
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method for maintaining an index for Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents, the method comprising the steps of: updating an XML document in response to a request to perform a piece-wise operation involving one or more nodes of the XML document, wherein the XML document is one of a plurality of XML documents indexed by said index, wherein a piece-wise operation is an operation that specifies a strict subset of the XML document and that only modifies the strict subset of the XML document; and in response to updating the XML document, modifying the index to reflect changes, made to the XML document, that were specified by the piece-wise operation, without altering entries of the index for any nodes other than the one or more nodes involved in the piece-wise operation; wherein, prior to updating the XML document, the index includes one or more index entries for nodes of the XML document that are not involved in the piece-wise operation; wherein the one or more index entries for the nodes of the XML document that are not involved in the piece-wise operation are not modified in response to updating the XML document; wherein modifying the index involves storing changes to a computer-readable storage medium; wherein: