Abstract
We introduce soft cardinality constraints which need to be satisfied on average only, and thus permit violations in a controlled manner. Starting from a highly expressive but intractable class, we establish a fragment that is maximal with respect to both expressivity and efficiency. More precisely, we characterise the associated implication problem axiomatically and develop a low-degree polynomial time decision algorithm. Any increase in expressivity of our fragment results in coNP-hardness of the implication problem. Finally, we extensively test the performance of our algorithm. The performance evaluation provides first-hand evidence that reasoning about expressive notions of soft cardinality constraints on XML data is practically efficient and scales well. Our results unleash soft cardinality constraints on real-world XML practice, where a little more semantics makes applications a lot more effective in contexts where exceptions to common rules may occur.
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Ferrarotti, F., Hartmann, S., Link, S., Marin, M., Muñoz, E. (2013). Soft Cardinality Constraints on XML Data. In: Lin, X., Manolopoulos, Y., Srivastava, D., Huang, G. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2013. WISE 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8180. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41230-1_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41230-1_32
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