Embodiments of the present invention address deficiencies of the art in respect to subscribing and updating nodes within XML documents and provide a novel and non-obvious method, system and computer program product for matching various combinations of XML Path Language (XPATH) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). In one embodiment of the invention, a method for matching various combinations of XML Path Language (XPATH) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) that includes 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, where the template resides in a database of a document management system, comparing the template expression to the XPATH expression and determining if the expressions match. The method can further include modifying the XPATH expression to account for a dominant attribute required by the template when the XPATH expression does not match the template expression and returning the modified XPATH expression.