1. A method for matching various combinations of XML Path Language (XPATH) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), the method comprising: receiving a XPATH expression for a node in an XML document; retrieving the node identified by the XPATH expression, determining if a template exists for the identified node, the template residing in a database of a document management system, comparing the template expression to the XPATH expression, and determining if the expressions match, when the XPATH expression does not match the template expression, modifying the XPATH expression to account for a dominant attribute required by the template and returning the modified XPATH expression.