The World Wide Web promises to transform human society by making virtually all types of information instantly available everywhere. Two prerequisites for this promise to be realized are a universal markup language and a universal query language. The power and flexibility of XML make it the leading candidate for a universal markup language. XML provides a way to label information from diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. Several XML-based query languages have been proposed, each oriented toward a specific category of information. Quilt is a new proposal that attempts to unify concepts from several of these query languages, resulting in a new language that exploits the full versatility of XML. The name Quilt suggests both the way in which features from several languages were assembled to make a new query language, and the way in which Quilt queries can combine information from diverse data sou...

Abstract. Although a feature model can represent commonalities and variabilities in a very concise taxonomic form, features in a feature model are merely symbols. Mapping features to other models, such as behavioral or data specifications, gives them semantics. In this paper, we propose a general template-based approach for mapping feature models to concise representations of variability in different kinds of other models. We show how the approach can be applied to UML 2.0 activity and class models and describe a prototype implementation. 1

Queries on XML documents typically combine selections on element contents, and, via path expressions, the structural relationships between tagged elements. Structural joins are used to find all pairs of elements satisfying the primitive structural relationships specified in the query, namely, parent child and ancestor descendant relationships. Efficient support for structural joins is thus the key to efficient implementations of XML queries. Recently proposed node numbering schemes enable the capturing of the XML document structure us- ing traditional indices (such as B+-trees or R-trees). This paper proposes efficient struc- tural join algorithms in the presence of tag indices. We first concentrate on using B+- trees and show how to expedite a structural join by avoiding collections of elements that do not participate in the join. We then intro- duce an enhancement (based on sibling pointers) that further improves performance. Such sibling pointers are easily implemented and dynamically maintainable. We also present a structural join algorithm that utilizes R-trees.

The containment and equivalence problems for various fragments of XPath have been studied by a number of authors. For some fragments, deciding containment (and even minimisation) has been shown to be in ptime, while for minor extensions containment has been shown to be conp-complete. When containment is with respect to trees satisfying a set of constraints (such as a schema or DTD), the problem seems to be more difficult. For example, containment under DTDs is conp- complete for an XPath fragment denoted XP for which containment is in ptime. It is also undecidable for a larger class of XPath queries when the constraints are so-called simple XPath integrity constraints (SXICs).

Traditional approaches to versioning semistructured information are edit-based, i.e., subsequent document versions are represented by using edit scripts. This paper proposes a reference-based version management scheme that preserves the logical structure of the evolving document through the use of object references. By preserving the document structure among versions the new scheme facilitates more efficient query support. In particular, we examine queries involving projections and selections on the document versions, as well as queries on the document evolution history. Moreover, we show that the proposed scheme provides an effective representation of multiversioned XML documents, both at the transport and exchange levels. In fact, with the reference-based scheme, a document's history can also be viewed and processed as yet another XML document. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the new scheme at the storage level. In particular, the scheme is enhanced with a usefulness-based page management policy that extends and adapts techniques used in transaction-time databases to ensure efficient clustering of information among versions. An extensive comparison of the reference-based versioning against representations used in temporal databases and persistent object managers depicts the performance advantages of the new approach. Finally it should be noted that reference-based versioning is applicable to other kinds of semistructured information (besides XML documents), and can be used to replace traditional version control schemes, such as the edit-based RCS and the timestamp-based SCCS.

We consider a subset of XPath expressions, called simple XPath expressions, which correspond to a class of conjunctive queries. We show that, in the absence of a DTD, each simple XPath expression has a unique minimal equivalent expression which can be found in polynomial time. We then consider D-equivalence, the equivalence of expressions with respect to the set of documents valid for a given DTD D. We show that a simple XPath expression P does not necessarily have a unique minimal D-equivalent expression. However, if P is reduced (there are no wildcards in it), then there is a unique minimal equivalent expression, but we show that deciding whether two reduced expressions are D-equivalent is coNP-hard.

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Abstract—With the standardization of XML as an information exchange language over the net, a huge amount of information is formatted in XML documents. In order to analyze this information efficiently, decomposing the XML documents and storing them in relational tables is a popular practice. However, query processing becomes expensive since, in many cases, an excessive number of joins is required to recover information from the fragmented data. If a collection consists of documents with different structures (for example, they come from different DTDs), mining clusters in the documents could alleviate the fragmentation problem. We propose a hierarchical algorithm (S-GRACE) for clustering XML documents based on structural information in the data. The notion of structure graph (s-graph) is proposed, supporting a computationally efficient distance metric defined between documents and sets of documents. This simple metric yields our new clustering algorithm which is efficient and effective, compared to other approaches based on tree-edit distance. Experiments on real data show that our algorithm can discover clusters not easily identified by manual inspection. Index Terms—Data mining, clustering, XML, semistructured data, query processing. 1

The Semantic Web is based on XML and RDF as its fundamental standards for exchanging and storing information on the World Wide Web. Event-condition-action (ECA) rules are a natural candidate for supporting reactive functionality on XML or RDF repositories. In this paper we describe a language for ECA rules on XML and a prototype implementation of this language. We also discuss some preliminary ideas regarding a language for ECA rules operating on a graph/triple representation of RDF, and we describe the architecture of a distributed deployment of such RDF ECA rules.

For most index structures for XML data proposed so far, update is a problem because XML element's coordinates are expressed by absolute values. Due to the structural relationship among elements in XML documents, we have to re-compute these absolute values if the content of source data is updated. The reconstruction requires update of large portion of index files, which causes a serious problem especially when XML data content is frequently updated. In this paper, we propose an indexing structure scheme based on the Relative Region Coordinate that can effectively deal with the update problem. The main idea is that we express the coordinate of an XML element based on the region of its parent element. We present an algorithm to construct a treestructured index in which related coordinates are stored together. In consequence, our indexing scheme requires update of only a small portion of index file in case of updating. 1. Introduction XML (Extensive Markup Language) was adopted by World W...