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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3457–3459Cite as

Semi-structured Query Languages

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Definition

A query language for semi-structured data allows a user to extract items from a semi-structured data instance, or to transform it into another semi-structured data instance. The first type of expressions are called queries, the latter kind of expressions are interchangeably called queries or transformations. Query languages can be classified along several dimensions:

  1. 1.

    Expressive power. What kind of queries or transformations can they express?

  2. 2.

    Querying vs. restructuring. Some query languages allow only the extraction of items from the data, others allow the data to be transformed.

  3. 3.

    Compositionality. Can the output of a query be used as input in another query expressed in the language, and is the composed transformation still expressible in the same language? Query languages that are restricted to extraction only are not compositional, because the type of their outputs are not semi-structured data instances. Transformation languages may fail to be compositional if the...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Abiteboul S, Quass D, McHugh J, Widom J, Wiener J. The Lorel query language for semistructured data. 1996. http://www-db.stanford.edu/lore/.

  2. Buneman P, Davidson S, Suciu D. Programming constructs for unstructured data. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Database Programming Languages; 1995.

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  3. Deutsch A, Fernandez M, Florescu D, Levy A., Suciu D. A query language for XML. In: Proceedings of the 8th International World Wide Web Conference; 1999. p. 77–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Fernandez M, Florescu D, Kang J, Levy A, Suciu D. Catching the boat with Strudel: experience with a Web-site management system. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1998. p. 414–25.

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  5. Papakonstantinou Y, Abiteboul S, Garcia-Molina H. Object fusion in mediator systems. In: Proceedings of the 22th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1996. p. 413–24.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Dan Suciu

Authors
  1. Dan Suciu
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Correspondence to Dan Suciu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Frank Tompa

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Suciu, D. (2018). Semi-structured Query Languages. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_339

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