What is Document Clustering

The ability of providing a “standardized, extensible means of coupling semantic information within documents describing semistructured data” (Chaudhri, Rashid, & Zicari, 2003) has led to a steady growth of XML (extensible markup language) data sources, so that XML is touted as the driving force for representing and exchanging data on the Web. The motivation behind any clustering problem is to find an inherent structure of relationships in the data and expose this structure as a set of clusters where the objects within the same cluster are each to other highly similar but very dissimilar from objects in different clusters. The clustering problem finds in text databases a fruitful research area. Since today semistructured text data has become more prevalent on the Web, and XML is the de facto standard for such data, clustering XML documents has increasingly attracted great attention. Any application domain that needs organization of complex document structures (e.g., hierarchical structures with unbounded nesting, object-oriented hierarchies) as well as data containing a few structured fields together with some largely unstructured text components can be profitably assisted by an XML document clustering task.