Abstract not found

Typechecking consists of statically verifying whether the output of an XML transformation is always conform to an output type for documents satisfying a given input type. We focus on complete algorithms which always produce the correct answer. We consider top-down XML transformations incorporating XPath expressions and abstract document types by grammars and tree automata. By restricting schema languages and transformations, we identify several practical settings for which typechecking is in polynomial time. Moreover, the resulting framework provides a rather complete picture as we show that most scenarios can not be enlarged without rendering the typechecking problem intractable. So, the present research sheds light on when to use fast complete algorithms and when to reside to sound but incomplete ones.

In [22], it was shown that MSO logic for ordered unranked trees becomes undecidable if Presburger constraints are allowed at children of nodes. We now show that a decidable logic is obtained if we use a a modal fixpoint logic instead. We present an automata theoretic characterization of this logic by means of deterministic Presburger tree automata (PTA) and show how it can be used to express numerical document queries. Surprisingly, the complexity of satisfiability for the extended logic is asymptotically the same as for the original logic. The non-emptiness for PTAs is in general pspace-complete which is moderate given that it is already pspace-hard to test whether the complement of a regular expression is non-empty. We also identify a subclass of PTAs with a tractable non-emptiness problem. Further, to decide whether a tree t satisfies a formula # is polynomial in the size of # and linear in the size of t.

We study the complexity of the inclusion, equivalence, and intersection problem for simple regular expressions arising in practical XML schemas. These basically consist of the concatenation of factors where each factor is a disjunction of strings possibly extended with ‘∗ ’ or ‘?’. We obtain lower and upper bounds for various fragments of simple regular expressions. Although we show that inclusion and intersection are already intractable for very weak expressions, we also identify some tractable cases. For equivalence, we only prove an initial tractability result leaving the complexity of more general cases open. The main motivation for this research comes from database theory, or more specifically XML and semi-structured data. We namely show that all lower and upper bounds for inclusion and equivalence, carry over to the corresponding decision problems for extended context-free grammars and single-type tree grammars, which are abstractions of DTDs and XML Schemas, respectively. For intersection, we show that the complexity only carries over for DTDs.

Abstract not found

Abstract. Macro tree transducers (mtt) are an important model that both covers many useful XML transformations and allows decidable exact typechecking. This paper reports our first step toward an implementation of mtt typechecker that has a practical efficiency. Our approach is to represent an input type obtained from a backward inference as an alternating tree automaton, in a style similar to Tozawa’s XSLT0 typechecking. In this approach, typechecking reduces to checking emptiness of an alternating tree automaton. We propose several optimizations (Cartesian factorization, state partitioning) on the backward inference process in order to produce much smaller alternating tree automata than the naive algorithm, and we present our efficient algorithm for checking emptiness of alternating tree automata, where we exploit the explicit representation of alternation for local optimizations. Our preliminary experiments confirm that our algorithm has a practical performance that can typecheck simple transformations with respect to the full XHTML in a reasonable time. 1

Abstract. Two natural decision problems regarding the XML query language XQuery are well-definedness and semantic type-checking. We study these problems in the setting of a relational fragment of XQuery. We show that well-definedness and semantic type-checking are undecidable, even in the positive-existential case. Nevertheless, for a “pure” variant of XQuery, in which no identification is made between an item and the singleton containing that item, the problems become decidable. We also consider the analogous problems in the setting of the nested relational calculus. 1

We survey some recent developments in the broad area of automata and logic which are motivated by the advent of XML. In particular, we consider unranked tree automata, tree-walking automata, and automata over infinite alphabets. We focus on their connection with logic and on questions imposed by XML.

XML type checking recently attracts interests of researchers. We discuss this problem for programs using higher order functions. In particular, we discuss programs modeled by the high-level tree transducer which was introduced by Engelfriet. We give one algorithm of XML type checking for this transducer.

Transformation of data documents is of special importance to use XML as the universal data interchange format on the Web. Data transformation is used in many tasks that require data to be transferred between existing, independently created Web-oriented applications. To perform such transformation one can use W3C's XSLT or XQuery. But these languages are devoted to detailed programming of transformation procedures. In this paper we show how data transformation can by specify by means of high-level rule specifications based on uniform unranked tree transducers. We show that our approach is both descriptive and expressive, and we illustrate how it can be used to specify and perform transformations of XML documents.