TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– Office documents are widely used in our daily activities, so the number of them has been increasing. A demand for sophisticated search for office documents becomes more important. The recent file format of office documents is based on a package of multiple XML files. These XML files include not only body text but also page structure data and style data. The purpose of this paper is to utilize them to find similar office documents.Design/methodology/approach– The authors propose SOS, a similarity search method based on structures and styles of office documents. SOS needs to compute similarity values between multiple pairs of XML files included in the office documents. We also propose LAX+, which is an algorithm to calculate a similarity value for a pair of XML files, by extending existing XML leaf node clustering algorithm.Findings– SOS and LAX+ are evaluated by using three types of office documents (docx, xlsx and pptx) in our experiments. The results of LAX+ and SOS are better than ones of the existing algorithms.Originality/value– Existing text‐based search engines do not take structure and style of documents into account. SOS can find similar documents by calculating similarities between multiple XML files corresponding to body texts, structures and styles. VL - 9 IS - 2 SN - 1744-0084 DO - 10.1108/IJWIS-03-2013-0005 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-03-2013-0005 AU - Watanabe Yousuke AU - Kamigaito Hidetaka AU - Yokota Haruo PY - 2013 Y1 - 2013/01/01 TI - Similarity search for office XML documents based on style and structure data T2 - International Journal of Web Information Systems PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 100 EP - 116 Y2 - 2024/04/19 ER -