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An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Regular XPath

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Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5708))

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Abstract

In this paper we present Regular XPath (RXPath), which is a natural extension of XPath with regular expressions over paths that has the same computational properties as XPath: linear-time query evaluation and exponential-time reasoning. To establish these results, we devise a unifying automata-theoretic framework based on two-way weak alternating tree automata. Specifically, we consider automata that have infinite runs on finite trees. This enables us to leverage and simplify existing automata-theoretic machinery and develop algorithms both for query evaluation and for reasoning over queries. With respect to the latter problem, we consider RXPath as a constraint language, and study constraint satisfiability, and query satisfiability and containment under constraints in the setting of RXPath.

A preliminary version of this paper, dealing with RXPath satisfiability only, has been presented at the 2008 Workshop on Logic in Databases (LID 2008).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. KRDB Research Centre, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Diego Calvanese

  2. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy

    Giuseppe De Giacomo & Maurizio Lenzerini

  3. Department of Computer Science, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX, 77251-1892, U.S.A.

    Moshe Y. Vardi

Authors
  1. Diego Calvanese
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  2. Giuseppe De Giacomo
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  3. Maurizio Lenzerini
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  4. Moshe Y. Vardi
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, 180 Queen’s Gate, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Philippa Gardner

  2. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

    Floris Geerts

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Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Lenzerini, M., Vardi, M.Y. (2009). An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Regular XPath. In: Gardner, P., Geerts, F. (eds) Database Programming Languages. DBPL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5708. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03793-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03793-1_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03792-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03793-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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