XML documents are extensively used in several applications and evolve over time. Identifying the semantics of these changes becomes a fundamental process to understand their evolution. Existing approaches related to understanding changes (diff) in XML documents focus only on syntactic changes. These approaches compare XML documents based on their structure, without considering the associated semantics. However, for large XML documents, which have undergone many changes from a version to the next, a large number of syntactic changes in the document may correspond to fewer semantic changes, which are then easier to analyze and understand. For instance, increasing the annual salary and the gross pay, and changing the job title of an employee (three syntactic changes) may mean that this employee was promoted (one semantic change). In this paper, we explore this idea and present the XChange approach. XChange considers the semantics of the changes to calculate the diff of different versions of XML documents. For such, our approach analyzes the granular syntactic changes in XML attributes and elements using inference rules to combine them into semantic changes. Thus, differently from existing approaches, XChange proposes the use of syntactic changes in versions of an XML document to infer the real reason for the change and support the process of semantic diff. Results of an experimental study indicate that XChange can provide higher effectiveness and efficiency when used to understand changes between versions of XML documents when compared with the (syntactic) state-of-the-art approaches.

XML文档已在多种应用程序中广泛使用，并且会随着时间的推移而发展。识别这些更改的语义成为了解其演变的基本过程。现有的有关认识变化的方法（DIFF）中的XML文档仅关注语法变化。这些方法根据XML文档的结构比较XML文档，而不考虑相关的语义。但是，对于大型XML文档（从一个版本到下一个版本已经历了许多更改），文档中的大量语法更改可能对应于较少的语义更改，从而更易于分析和理解。例如，增加年薪和工资总额，并更改员工的职称（三个语法更改）可能意味着该员工已晋升（一个语义上的更改）。在本文中，我们探索了这种想法并提出了XChange方法。XChange考虑更改的语义以计算XML文档不同版本的差异。对于这样，我们的方法使用推理规则分析XML属性和元素中的语法细化变化，以将它们组合成语义变化。因此，与现有方法不同，XChange建议在XML文档的版本中使用句法更改，以推断出更改的真正原因并支持语义差异处理。实验研究的结果表明，与（语法）最新方法相比，当使用XChange理解XML文档版本之间的更改时，XChange可以提供更高的有效性和效率。