Article

Structural characterizations of the semantics of XPath as navigation tool on a document

Authors:

Dirk Van Gucht,

George H. L. FletcherAuthors Info & Claims

PODS '06: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems

Pages 318 - 327

https://doi.org/10.1145/1142351.1142397

Published: 26 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Given a document D in the form of an unordered labeled tree, we study the expressibility on D of various fragments of XPath, the core navigational language on XML documents. We give characterizations, in terms of the structure of D, for when a binary relation on its nodes is definable by an XPath expression in these fragments. Since each pair of nodes in such a relation represents a unique path in D, our results therefore capture the sets of paths in D definable in XPath. We refer to this perspective on the semantics of XPath as the "global view." In contrast with this global view, there is also a "local view" where one is interested in the nodes to which one can navigate starting from a particular node in the document. In this view, we characterize when a set of nodes in D can be defined as the result of applying an XPath expression to a given node of D. All these definability results, both in the global and the local view, are obtained by using a robust two-step methodology, which consists of first characterizing when two nodes cannot be distinguished by an expression in the respective fragments of XPath, and then bootstrapping these characterizations to the desired results.

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Cited By

Hellings JGyssens MVan Den Bussche JVan Gucht D(2023)Expressive Completeness of Two-Variable First-Order Logic with Counting for First-Order Logic Queries on Rooted Unranked Trees2023 38th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)10.1109/LICS56636.2023.10175828(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/LICS56636.2023.10175828
Arenas MDiaz G(2016)The Exact Complexity of the First-Order Logic Definability ProblemACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/288609541:2(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2886095
Hellings JGyssens MWu YVan Gucht DVan den Bussche JVansummeren SFletcher GCheney JNeumann T(2015)Relative expressive power of downward fragments of navigational query languages on trees and chainsProceedings of the 15th Symposium on Database Programming Languages10.1145/2815072.2815081(59-68)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2815072.2815081
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Structural characterizations of the semantics of XPath as navigation tool on a document
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages

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cover image ACM Conferences

PODS '06: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems

June 2006

382 pages

ISBN:1595933182

DOI:10.1145/1142351

General Chair:
Georg Gottlob
Vienna University of Technology
,
Program Chair:
Jan Van den Bussche
Hasselt University

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 June 2006

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SIGMOD/PODS06

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SIGMOD/PODS06: International Conference on Management of Data and Symposium on Principles Database and Systems

June 26 - 28, 2006

IL, Chicago, USA

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PODS '06 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 185 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

Hellings JGyssens MVan Den Bussche JVan Gucht D(2023)Expressive Completeness of Two-Variable First-Order Logic with Counting for First-Order Logic Queries on Rooted Unranked Trees2023 38th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)10.1109/LICS56636.2023.10175828(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/LICS56636.2023.10175828
Arenas MDiaz G(2016)The Exact Complexity of the First-Order Logic Definability ProblemACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/288609541:2(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2886095
Hellings JGyssens MWu YVan Gucht DVan den Bussche JVansummeren SFletcher GCheney JNeumann T(2015)Relative expressive power of downward fragments of navigational query languages on trees and chainsProceedings of the 15th Symposium on Database Programming Languages10.1145/2815072.2815081(59-68)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2815072.2815081
Fletcher GGyssens MLeinders DBussche JGucht DVansummeren SWu Y(2015)The impact of transitive closure on the expressiveness of navigational query languages on unlabeled graphsAnnals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence10.1007/s10472-013-9346-x73:1-2(167-203)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10472-013-9346-x
Cuzzocrea A(2014)Synopsis Data Structures for XML DatabasesEncyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch183(1906-1913)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2014
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch183
Fletcher GGuerrini G(2013)What we talk about when we talk about graphsProceedings of the Joint EDBT/ICDT 2013 Workshops10.1145/2457317.2457349(184-184)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2457317.2457349
Fletcher GGyssens MLeinders DVan den Bussche JVan Gucht DVansummeren SWu Y(2012)The impact of transitive closure on the boolean expressiveness of navigational query languages on graphsProceedings of the 7th international conference on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems10.1007/978-3-642-28472-4_8(124-143)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2012
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Luo YPicalausa FFletcher GHidders JVansummeren S(2012)Storing and Indexing Massive RDF DatasetsSemantic Search over the Web10.1007/978-3-642-25008-8_2(31-60)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2012
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25008-8_2
Fletcher GGyssens MParedaens JVan Gucht D(2009)On the Expressive Power of the Relational Algebra on Finite Sets of Relation PairsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2008.22121:6(939-942)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2008.221
Fletcher GVan Gucht DWu YGyssens MBrenes SParedaens J(2009)A methodology for coupling fragments of XPath with structural indexes for XML documentsInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2008.09.00334:7(657-670)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.is.2008.09.003
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