Abstract
The increasing popularity of XML for persistent data storage, processing and exchange has triggered the demand for efficient algorithms to manage XML data. Both industry and academia have long since recognized the importance of keys in XML data management. In this paper we make a theoretical as well as a practical contribution to this area. This endeavour is ambitious given the multitude of intractability results that have been established. Our theoretical contribution is based in the definition of a new fragment of XML keys that keeps the right balance between expressiveness and efficiency of maintenance. More precisely, we characterize the associated implication problem axiomatically and develop a low-degree polynomial time decision algorithm. In comparison to previous work, this new fragment of XML keys provides designers with an enhanced ability to capture properties of XML data that are significant for the application at hand. Our practical contribution includes an efficient implementation of this decision algorithm and a thorough evaluation of its performance, demonstrating that reasoning about expressive notions of XML keys can be done efficiently in practice, and scales well. Our results promote the use of XML keys on real-world XML practice, where a little more semantics makes applications a lot more effective. To exemplify this potential, we use the decision algorithm to calculate non-redundant covers for sets of XML keys. In turn, this allow us to reduce significantly the time required to validate large XML documents against keys from the proposed fragment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., Vianu, V.: Foundations of Databases. Addison-Wesley (1995)
Aho, A., Ullman, J., Hopcroft, J.: Data structures and algorithms. Addison-Wesley (1983)
Apparao, V., et al.: Document object model (DOM) level 1 specification, W3C recommendation (1998), http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/
Arenas, M., Fan, W., Libkin, L.: What’s hard about XML schema constraints? In: Hameurlain, A., Cicchetti, R., Traunmüller, R. (eds.) DEXA 2002. LNCS, vol. 2453, pp. 269–278. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Arenas, M., Libkin, L.: XML data exchange: Consistency and query answering. J. ACM 55, 7:1–7:72 (2008)
Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C.M., Maler, E., Yergeau, F.: Extensible markup language (XML) 1.0, 4th edn., W3C recommendation (2006), http://www.w3.org/TR/xml
Buneman, P., Davidson, S., Fan, W., Hara, C., Tan, W.: Keys for XML. Computer Networks 39(5), 473–487 (2002)
Buneman, P., Davidson, S., Fan, W., Hara, C., Tan, W.: Reasoning about keys for XML. Inf. Syst. 28(8), 1037–1063 (2003)
Chen, Y., Davidson, S., Zheng, Y.: Xkvalidator: a constraint validator for XML. In: CIKM 2002: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM CIKM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, pp. 446–452. ACM (2002)
Clark, J., DeRose, S.: XML path language (XPath) version 1.0, W3C recommendation (1999), http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
Ferrarotti, F., Hartmann, S., Link, S., Wang, J.: Promoting the semantic capability of XML keys. In: Lee, M.L., Yu, J.X., Bellahsène, Z., Unland, R. (eds.) XSym 2010. LNCS, vol. 6309, pp. 144–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Ferrarotti, F., Hartmann, S., Link, S., Marin, M., Muñoz, E.: Performance analysis of algorithms to reason about XML keys. In: Liddle, S.W., Schewe, K.-D., Tjoa, A.M., Zhou, X. (eds.) DEXA 2012, Part I. LNCS, vol. 7446, pp. 101–115. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Gottlob, G., Koch, C., Pichler, R.: Efficient algorithms for processing XPath queries. Trans. Database Syst. 30(2), 444–491 (2005)
Hartmann, S., Köhler, H., Link, S., Trinh, T., Wang, J.: On the notion of an XML key. In: Schewe, K.-D., Thalheim, B. (eds.) SDKB 2008. LNCS, vol. 4925, pp. 103–112. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Hartmann, S., Link, S.: Efficient reasoning about a robust XML key fragment. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 34(2) (2009)
Hartmann, S., Link, S.: Expressive, yet tractable XML keys. In: EDBT 2009: 12th International Conference on Extending Database Technology. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, vol. 360, pp. 357–367. ACM (2009)
Jungnickel, D.: Graphs, Networks and Algorithms. Springer (1999)
Liu, Y., Yang, D., Tang, S., Wang, T., Gao, J.: Validating key constraints over XML document using XPath and structure checking. Future Generation Comp. Syst. 21(4), 583–595 (2005)
Maier, D.: Minimum Covers in the Relational Database Model. J. ACM 27, 664–674 (1980)
Miklau, G., Suciu, D.: Containment and equivalence for a fragment of XPath. J. ACM 51(1), 2–45 (2004)
Stewart, D.B., Khosla, P.K.: Mechanisms for Detecting and Handling Timing Errors. Commun. ACM 40(1), 87–93 (1997)
Suciu, D.: XML Data Repository, University of Washington (2002), http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/xmldatasets/www/repository.html
Thompson, H., Beech, D., Maloney, M., Mendelsohn, N.: XML Schema Part 1: Structures, 2nd edn., W3C Recommendation (2004), http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ferrarotti, F., Hartmann, S., Link, S., Marin, M., Muñoz, E. (2013). The Finite Implication Problem for Expressive XML Keys: Foundations, Applications, and Performance Evaluation. In: Hameurlain, A., Küng, J., Wagner, R., Liddle, S.W., Schewe, KD., Zhou, X. (eds) Transactions on Large-Scale Data- and Knowledge-Centered Systems X. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8220. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41221-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41221-9_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41220-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41221-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)