1. A method of projecting a representation of a document in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format comprising steps of: providing at least one XPath query to an XML processor where the query may use forward, backward, following-sibling, and preceding-sibling axes; providing an XML document to the XML processor; and creating a projection of the XML document for evaluation of the XPath query using approximate matching techniques, such that result of evaluation of the XPath query on the projected document is a superset of the result of evaluation of the XPath query on the original document.