Well-Definedness and Semantic Type-Checking in the Nested Relational Calculus and XQuery

Extended Abstract
  • Jan Van den Bussche
  • Dirk Van Gucht
  • Stijn Vansummeren
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 3363)

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.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. 1.
    Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., Vianu, V.: Foundations Of Databases. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1995)MATHGoogle Scholar
  2. 2.
    Alon, N., Milo, T., Neven, F., Suciu, D., Vianu, V.: Typechecking XML views of relational databases. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic 4(3), 315–354 (2003)CrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  3. 3.
    Alon, N., Milo, T., Neven, F., Suciu, D., Vianu, V.: XML with data values: typechecking revisited. Journal of Computer and System Sciences 66(4), 688–727 (2003)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  4. 4.
    Biron, P.V., Malhotra, A.: XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes. W3C Recommendation (May 2001)Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Boag, S., Chamberlin, D., Fernández, M.F., Florescu, D., Robie, J., Siméon, J.: XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language. W3C Working Draft (November 2003)Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Buneman, P., Naqvi, S.A., Tannen, V., Wong, L.: Principles of programming with complex objects and collection types. Theoretical Computer Science 149(1), 3–48 (1995)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  7. 7.
    Chamberlin, D., Fankhauser, P., Florescu, D., Marchiori, M., Robie, J.: XML Query Use Cases. W3C Working Draft (November 2003)Google Scholar
  8. 8.
    Chandra, A.K., Vardi, M.Y.: The implication problem for functional and inclusion dependencies is undecidable. SIAM Journal on Computing 14(3), 671–677 (1985)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  9. 9.
    Draper, D., Fankhauser, P., Fernández, M.F., Malhotra, A., Rose, K., Rys, M., Siméon, J., Wadler, P.: XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics. W3C Working Draft (February 2004)Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Fernández, M.F., Florescu, D., Levy, A., Suciu, D.: Declarative specification of Web sites with Strudel. The VLDB Journal 9, 38–55 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  11. 11.
    Fernández, M.F., Malhotra, A., Marsh, J., Nagy, M., Walsh, N.: XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model. W3C Working Draft (November 2003)Google Scholar
  12. 12.
    Levy, A.Y., Suciu, D.: Deciding containment for queries with complex objects (extended abstract). In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 20–31. ACM Press, New York (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 13.
    Martens, W., Neven, F.: Typechecking top-down uniform unranked tree transducers. In: Calvanese, D., Lenzerini, M., Motwani, R. (eds.) ICDT 2003. LNCS, vol. 2572, pp. 64–78. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. 14.
    Martens, W., Neven, F.: Frontiers of tractability for typechecking simple xml transformations. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-third ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 23–34. ACM Press, New York (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 15.
    Milo, T., Suciu, D., Vianu, V.: Typechecking for XML transformers. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 11–22. ACM Press, New York (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 16.
    Neven, F.: Personal communication (May 2004)Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    Suciu, D.: Typechecking for semistructured data. In: Ghelli, G., Grahne, G. (eds.) DBPL 2001. LNCS, vol. 2397, pp. 1–20. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. 18.
    Thompson, H.S., Beech, D., Maloney, M., Mendelsohn, N.: XML Schema Part 1: Structures. W3C Recommendation (May 2001)Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Wong, L.: Querying nested collections. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania (1994)Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jan Van den Bussche
    • 1
  • Dirk Van Gucht
    • 2
  • Stijn Vansummeren
    • 1
  1. 1.Limburgs Universitair CentrumDiepenbeekBelgium
  2. 2.Indiana UniversityBloomingtonUSA

Personalised recommendations