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Structure Depth :
The purpose of this indicator is to reveal how deep are structured the elements in the flood. One of the key interests to it is that instead of focusing on one element, such like the deepest in the stream, the indicator provides all relevant statistical figures that help understand the design of the Xml stream without even actually viewing it on screen. In fact, not only this kind of indicator fills particularly well the gap of statistical figures on Xml hierarchies, but it helps to extract key design. Automatically building the structure (kind of reverse engineering) has the important purpose of showing how well or may be how ill-suited an Xml stream is wrt optimization, design, and parsing performance.
The depth itself is an obvious measure. In the sample Xml stream below, the
Bookstore element is at depth 1, while
Book is at depth 2 (and so are its attributes), and finally
Title is at depth 3.
Hint : The deeper an element is, the more it needs closing tags to go up and back to depth 1, hence the bloat in size.
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Depth Max :
This indicator shows the highest element depth in the Xml stream. It reveals by itself how "oblique" is the structure in terms of pure viewing metaphore. If the highest depth is low, this doesn't always mean that the Xml stream is "vertical" because the distribution may have most of its data very far from the highest depth. That's where the Depth Mean, and Depth Standard Deviation have their words to say, along with the vivid Depth histogram chart.
On the contrary, if the highest depth is high, over 10 for instance, you know that you are dealing with a very original Xml stream !
At least, the indicator can alert you if the Xml stream processed is quite unstructured, that is not tabular at all. This fairly indicates that this Xml stream does not follow the usual trends and is likely to experience difficulties in beind integrated in a supply chain.
In the depth histogram chart, the depth max is along the horizontal axis.
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Depth Mean :
This indicator shows the average element depth in the Xml stream. It reveals how hierarchical or tabular is the structure of the Xml stream. If the mean is low, the stream is tabular, ie looks like a standard table. If the mean is high, the stream is likely to be hierarchical. If the standard deviation is low, say below 1, the stream is tabular but has much of its structure at a high depth. If the standard deviation is high, the stream is hierarchical because the distribution is uniform wrt the depth.
In the depth histogram chart, the depth mean is along the horizontal axis.
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Depth Standard Deviation :
This indicator shows how is distributed the Xml structure wrt the depth measure.
If the standard deviation is low, say below 1, the structure is compact and stays around the mean depth. If the standard deviation is high, the distribution is proportionally uniform and flat, the stream thus looks much hierarchical.
NB: the standard deviation is mathematically speaking the 2nd order moment of the depth distribution.
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Occurences of depth of an element :
This indicator shows the amount of occurences of an element at a given depth. If you see 10 for depth 1, it means that out of all elements in the Xml stream, 10 of them are at depth 1. Among these 10, you may find for instance 4 <Book>, 5 <Supplier> and 1 <Order>.
In the depth histogram chart, the depth axis is the horizontal axis. The vertical axis is the amount of occurences of a given depth.
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Listing of elements at a given depth :
The element names enclosed with < and > chars are those that appear in the Xml stream at a given depth.
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