Abstract
In this paper, we study the safety of formulas, computability and local property of Web queries. The limited access capability and loosely structured information make querying the Web significantly different from querying a conventional database. When evaluating queries on the Web, it is not feasible to exhaustively examine all objects on the Web. The local property, studied in this paper, can be informally described as the reverse scenario: in order to check if an object participated in the result of a Web query, is it sufficient to examine a bounded portion of the Web? We start our investigation by using the Web machine proposed by Mendelzon and Milo [1]. We review the genericity, domain independence and computability of Web queries. We present a syntactic class of local Web queries and a sound algorithm to check if a query belongs to this class. We then examine the notion of locality of two popular XML query languages, namely XPath and XQuery, and show that they are not local.
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Liu, HC., Yu, J.X. (2008). On Safety, Computability and Local Property of Web Queries. In: Zhang, Y., Yu, G., Bertino, E., Xu, G. (eds) Progress in WWW Research and Development. APWeb 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4976. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78849-2_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78849-2_27
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78848-5
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