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XPath with Conditional Axis Relations

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Advances in Database Technology - EDBT 2004 (EDBT 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2992))

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Abstract

This paper is about the W3C standard node-addressing language for XML documents, called XPath. XPath is still under development. Version 2.0 appeared in 2001 while the theoretical foundations of Version 1.0 (dating from 1998) are still being widely studied. The paper aims at bringing XPath to a “stable fixed point” in its development: a version which is expressively complete, still manageable computationally, with a user-friendly syntax and a natural semantics. We focus on an important axis relation which is not expressible in XPath 1.0 and is very useful in practice: the conditional axis. With it we can express paths specified by for instance “do a child step, while test is true at the resulting node”. We study the effect of adding conditional axis relations to XPath on its expressive power and the complexity of the query evaluation and query equivalence problems. We define an XPath dialect \(\mathcal{X}\)CPath which is expressively complete, has a linear time query evaluation algorithm and for which query equivalence given a DTD can be decided in exponential time.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Language and Inference Technology, ILLC, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maarten Marx

Authors
  1. Maarten Marx
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University,  

    Elisa Bertino

  2. Laboratory of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems and Applications, Technical University of Crete (MUSIC/TUC) Chania, 73100, Crete, Greece

    Stavros Christodoulakis

  3. Institute of Computer Science, FO.R.T.H., Vassilika Vouton, P.O. Box 1385, GR 71110, Heraklion, Greece

    Dimitris Plexousakis

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, P.O.Box 2208, GR 71409, Heraklion, Greece

    Vassilis Christophides

  5. National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

    Manolis Koubarakis

  6. IPD, Universität Karlsruhe, Am Fasanengarten 5, 76131, Karlsruhe,  

    Klemens Böhm

  7. Department of Computer Science and Communication, University of Insubria, 22100, Varese, Italy

    Elena Ferrari

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Marx, M. (2004). XPath with Conditional Axis Relations. In: Bertino, E., et al. Advances in Database Technology - EDBT 2004. EDBT 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2992. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24741-8_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24741-8_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21200-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24741-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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