Tree Representations of XML and JSON Data Formats with an Implementation in R

• Activity Number: 464
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Xiaotian Dai*+ and Juergen Symanzik
• Companies: and Utah State University
• Keywords: Extensible Markup Language ; JavaScript Object Notation ; Data Structure ; Visualization

Abstract

Extensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) are widely used in web applications for data storage. Both, XML and JSON documents, have a hierarchical data structure and can be summarized as a tree structure, called XML tree or JSON tree. A tree data structure represents a hierarchical data structure with a set of linked nodes. It is important for data scientists to understand the node structure and the relationship among the nodes within XML and JSON documents. The tree representation can provide an intuitive visualization of the data structures. Based on this idea, in this article, we will discuss the implementation of XML trees and JSON trees in the R software environment.