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Declarative XML Schema Validation with SWI–Prolog

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Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (WFLP 2017, WLP 2017, INAP 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10997))

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Abstract

Xml Schema is a well–established mechanism to define the structure and constrain the content of an Xml document. While this approach taken by itself is declarative, currently available tools for Xml validation are not. In this paper we introduce an implementation of an Xsd validator in Swi–Prolog, made publicly available as the package library(xsd). Our approach is based on flattening the Xsd and Xml documents into Prolog facts. The top–down validation makes great use of Prolog’s backtracking and unification capabilities. To ensure the compliance to the Xsd standard and to support the test–driven development, we have created a test framework based on the Test Anything Protocol and Swi–Prolog’s quasi–quotations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://xerces.apache.org/ [accessed 12 March 2018], Apache License 2.0.

  2. 2.

    https://www.oxygenxml.com/ [accessed 12 March 2018], proprietary license.

  3. 3.

    http://www.saxonica.com/ [accessed 12 March 2018], Xsd  1.1 support in Saxon Enterprise Edition 9.5, proprietary license.

  4. 4.

    http://www.jclark.com/sp/ [accessed 12 March 2018].

  5. 5.

    xsd2json is in active use and maintained. It is available as open source at https://github.com/fnogatz/xsd2json (MIT License). Because of recent improvements, the constraint functors have been slightly changed compared to [16].

  6. 6.

    Xml attributes in general do not have any namespaces. For special attributes like the declaration of the namespace prefix xs in xmlns:xs="\(\dots \)", this is handled separately.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/mndrix/regex [accessed 12 March 2018], The Unlicense.

  8. 8.

    library(xsd) provides the options ’without-tabling’(Bool) and profile(Bool). The example in /test/example/choice_minmax returns: without memoisation 0.55s with 3,628,657 inferences; with memoisation 0.01s with 50,370 inferences (Swi–Prolog 7.7.5).

  9. 9.

    https://travis-ci.org/ [accessed 12 March 2018].

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/mndrix/tap [accessed 12 March 2018], The Unlicense.

  11. 11.

    A list of currently supported Xsd features can be found at https://github.com/jonakalkus/xsd/blob/master/FEATURES.md [accessed 12 March 2018].

  12. 12.

    The example in /test/example/sequence_unbounded* returns: Xsd with 200 lines of code in 0.11s with 281,288 inferences; 400 lines of code in 0.71s with 1,042,288 inferences (Swi–Prolog 7.7.5).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, 97074, Würzburg, Germany

    Falco Nogatz & Jona Kalkus

Authors
  1. Falco Nogatz
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  2. Jona Kalkus
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Correspondence to Falco Nogatz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Würzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany

    Dietmar Seipel

  2. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany

    Michael Hanus

  3. Universidade de Èvora, Evora, Portugal

    Salvador Abreu

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Nogatz, F., Kalkus, J. (2018). Declarative XML Schema Validation with SWI–Prolog. In: Seipel, D., Hanus, M., Abreu, S. (eds) Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management. WFLP WLP INAP 2017 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00801-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00801-7_12

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00800-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00801-7

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