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Equivalences and optimizations in an expressive XSLT subset

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Abstract

XML is the standard data interchange format and XSLT is the W3C proposed standard for transforming and restructuring XML documents. It turns out that XSLT has very powerful query capabilities as well. Hovewer, due to its complex syntax and lack of formal specification, it is not a trivial task to decide whether two XSLT stylesheets yield the same result, even if for an XSLT subset. We isolate such fragment, powerful enough for expressing several interesting queries and for manipulating XML documents and show how to translate them into queries expressed in a properly extended version of TAX, a powerful XML query algebra, for which we provide a collection of equivalence rules. It is then possible to reason about XSLT equivalences, by translating XSLT stylesheets into XTAX expressions and then statically verifying their equivalence, by means of the mentioned equivalence rules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Via Mazzini, 5, 21100, Varese, Italy

    Alberto Trombetta

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Via di Mura Anteo Zambni 7, 40127, Bologna, Italy

    Danilo Montesi

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  1. Alberto Trombetta
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  2. Danilo Montesi
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Correspondence to Alberto Trombetta.

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Trombetta, A., Montesi, D. Equivalences and optimizations in an expressive XSLT subset. Acta Informatica 42, 515–539 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-005-0004-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-005-0004-6

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