XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

15.4. Benefits of XDM

In this section, we summarize the benefits achieved by XDM.

• Flexibility: A major critique of the data-mining research field is that each technique has been developed with data models that strongly differ from the models of other techniques. This causes difficulties in integrating different data-mining techniques in the same system. Furthermore, the need for database support has been widely recognized, but relational databases are not suitable for managing with ease data represented in other models (such as trees). With XDM, we exploit the flexible structure of XML to integrate any kind of data representation in the XDM database, including trees.

• Derivation dependencies: The derivation process is maintained inside the XDM ...