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Satisfiability of XPath Queries with Sibling Axes

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Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3774))

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Abstract

We study the satisfiability problem for XPath fragments supporting the following-sibling and preceding-sibling axes. Although this problem was recently studied for XPath fragments without sibling axes, little is known about the impact of the sibling axes on the satisfiability analysis. To this end we revisit the satisfiability problem for a variety of XPath fragments with sibling axes, in the presence of DTDs, in the absence of DTDs, and under various restricted DTDs. In these settings we establish complexity bounds ranging from NLOGSPACE to undecidable. Our main conclusion is that in many cases, the presence of sibling axes complicates the satisfiability analysis. Indeed, we show that there are XPath satisfiability problems that are in PTIME and PSPACE in the absence of sibling axes, but that become NP-hard and EXPTIME-hard, respectively, when sibling axes are used instead of the corresponding vertical modalities (e.g., the wildcard and the descendant axis).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasselt University and University of Edinburgh,  

    Floris Geerts

  2. University of Edinburgh and Bell Laboratories,  

    Wenfei Fan

Authors
  1. Floris Geerts
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  2. Wenfei Fan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Cambridge,  

    Gavin Bierman

  2. Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Christoph Koch

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Geerts, F., Fan, W. (2005). Satisfiability of XPath Queries with Sibling Axes. In: Bierman, G., Koch, C. (eds) Database Programming Languages. DBPL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3774. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11601524_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11601524_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-30951-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31445-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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