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

Gyssens, M. and Paredaens, J. and Van Gucht, D. and Fletcher, George H.L. (2006) Structural characterizations of the semantics of XPath as navigation tool on a document. In: Vansummeren, S. (ed.) Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 318-327. ISBN 9781595933188.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/1142351.1142397

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.

Metadata

Item Type:	Book Section
School:	Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences
Depositing User:	Sarah Hall
Date Deposited:	30 Mar 2021 07:43
Last Modified:	09 Aug 2023 12:50
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/43730

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