Wim Martens

Expressiveness and complexity of XML Schema

The common abstraction of XML Schema by unranked regular tree languages is not entirely accurate. To shed some light on the actual expressive power of XML Schema, intuitive semantical characterizations of the Element Declarations Consistent (EDC) rule are provided. In particular, it is obtained that schemas satisfying EDC can only reason about regular properties of ancestors of nodes. Hence, with respect to expressive power, XML Schema is closer to DTDs than to tree automata. These theoretical results are complemented with an investigation of the XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) occurring in practice, revealing that the extra expressiveness of XSDs over DTDs is only used to a very limited extent. As this might be due to the complexity of the XML Schema specification and the difficulty of understanding the effect of constraints on typing and validation of schemas, a simpler formalism equivalent to XSDs is proposed. It is based on contextual patterns rather than on recursive types and it might serve as a light-weight front end for XML Schema. Next, the effect of EDC on the way XML documents can be typed is discussed. It is argued that a cleaner, more robust, larger but equally feasible class is obtained by replacing EDC with the notion of 1-pass preorder typing (1PPT): schemas that allow one to determine the type of an element of a streaming document when its opening tag is met. This notion can be defined in terms of grammars with restrained competition regular expressions and there is again an equivalent syntactical formalism based on contextual patterns. Finally, algorithms for recognition, simplification, and inclusion of schemas for the various classes are given.

On the minimization of XML Schemas and tree automata for unranked trees

Automata for unranked trees form a foundation for XML Schemas, querying and pattern languages. We study the problem of efficiently minimizing such automata. First, we study unranked tree automata that are standard in database theory, assuming bottom-up determinism and that horizontal recursion is represented by deterministic finite automata. We show that minimal automata in that class are not unique and that minimization is np-complete. Second, we study more recent automata classes that do allow for polynomial time minimization. Among those, we show that bottom-up deterministic stepwise tree automata yield the most succinct representations. Third, we investigate abstractions of XML schema languages. In particular, we show that the class of one-pass preorder typeable schemas allows for polynomial time minimization and unique minimal models.

Typechecking Top-Down Uniform Unranked Tree Transducers

We investigate the typechecking problem for XML queries: statically verifying that every answer to a query conforms to a given output schema, for inputs satisfying a given input schema. As typechecking quickly turns undecidable for query languages capable of testing equality of data values, we return to the limited framework where we abstract XML documents as labeled ordered trees. We focus on simple top-down recursive transformations motivated by XSLT and structural recursion on trees. We parameterize the problem by several restrictions on the transformations (deleting, non-deleting, bounded width) and consider both tree automata and DTDs as output schemas. The complexity of the typechecking problems in this scenario range from PTIME to EXPTIME.

Optimizing Schema Languages for XML: Numerical Constraints and Interleaving

The presence of a schema offers many advantages in processing, translating, querying, and storage of XML data. Basic decision problems like equivalence, inclusion, and non-emptiness of intersection of schemas form the basic building blocks for schema optimization and integration, and algorithms for static analysis of transformations. It is thereby paramount to establish the exact complexity of these problems. Most common schema languages for XML can be adequately modeled by some kind of grammar with regular expressions at right-hand sides. In this paper, we observe that apart from the usual regular operators of union, concatenation and Kleene-star, schema languages also allow numerical occurrence constraints and interleaving operators. Although the expressiveness of these operators remain within the regular languages, their presence or absence has significant impact on the complexity of the basic decision problems. We present a complete overview of the complexity of the basic decision problems for DTDs, XSDs and Relax NG with regular expressions incorporating numerical occurrence constraints and interleaving. We also discuss chain regular expressions and the complexity of the schema simplification problem incorporating the new operators.

Complexity of Decision Problems for Simple Regular Expressions.

We study the complexity of the inclusion, equivalence, and intersection problem for simple regular expressions arising in practical XML schemas. These basically consist of the concatenation of factors where each factor is a disjunction of strings possibly extended with ‘*’ or ‘?’. We obtain lower and upper bounds for various fragments of simple regular expressions. Although we show that inclusion and intersection are already intractable for very weak expressions, we also identify some tractable cases. For equivalence, we only prove an initial tractability result leaving the complexity of more general cases open. The main motivation for this research comes from database theory, or more specifically XML and semi-structured data. We namely show that all lower and upper bounds for inclusion and equivalence, carry over to the corresponding decision problems for extended context-free grammars and single-type tree grammars, which are abstractions of DTDs and XML Schemas, respectively. For intersection, we show that the complexity only carries over for DTDs.

Querying graph databases with XPath

XPath plays a prominent role as an XML navigational language due to several factors, including its ability to express queries of interest, its close connection to yardstick database query languages (e.g., first-order logic), and the low complexity of query evaluation for many fragments. Another common database model---graph databases---also requires a heavy use of navigation in queries; yet it largely adopts a different approach to querying, relying on reachability patterns expressed with regular constraints. Our goal here is to investigate the behavior and applicability of XPath-like languages for querying graph databases, concentrating on their expressiveness and complexity of query evaluation. We are particularly interested in a model of graph data that combines navigation through graphs with querying data held in the nodes, such as, for example, in a social network scenario. As navigational languages, we use analogs of core and regular XPath and augment them with various tests on data values. We relate these languages to first-order logic, its transitive closure extensions, and finite-variable fragments thereof, proving several capture results. In addition, we describe their relative expressive power. We then show that they behave very well computationally: they have a low-degree polynomial combined complexity, which becomes linear for several fragments. Furthermore, we introduce new types of tests for XPath languages that let them capture first-order logic with data comparisons and prove that the low complexity bounds continue to apply to such extended languages. Therefore, XPath-like languages seem to be very well-suited to query graphs.

The complexity of evaluating path expressions in SPARQL

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently introduced property paths in SPARQL 1.1, a query language for RDF data. Property paths allow SPARQL queries to evaluate regular expressions over graph data. However, they differ from standard regular expressions in several notable aspects. For example, they have a limited form of negation, they have numerical occurrence indicators as syntactic sugar, and their semantics on graphs is defined in a non-standard manner. We formalize the W3C semantics of property paths and investigate various query evaluation problems on graphs. More specifically, let x and y be two nodes in an edge-labeled graph and r be an expression. We study the complexities of (1) deciding whether there exists a path from x to y that matches r and (2) counting how many paths from x to y match r. Our main results show that, compared to an alternative semantics of regular expressions on graphs, the complexity of (1) and (2) under W3C semantics is significantly higher. Whereas the alternative semantics remains in polynomial time for large fragments of expressions, the W3C semantics makes problems (1) and (2) intractable almost immediately. As a side-result, we prove that the membership problem for regular expressions with numerical occurrence indicators and negation is in polynomial time.

Frontiers of tractability for typechecking simple XML transformations

Typechecking consists of statically verifying whether the output of an XML transformation is always conform to an output type for documents satisfying a given input type. We focus on complete algorithms which always produce the correct answer. We consider top-down XML transformations incorporating XPath expressions and abstract document types by grammars and tree automata. By restricting schema languages and transformations, we identify several practical settings for which typechecking can be done in polynomial time. Moreover, the resulting framework provides a rather complete picture as we show that most scenarios cannot be enlarged without rendering the typechecking problem intractable. So, the present research sheds light on when to use fast complete algorithms and when to reside to sound but incomplete ones.

Complexity of Decision Problems for XML Schemas and Chain Regular Expressions

We study the complexity of the inclusion, equivalence, and intersection problem of extended chain regular expressions (eCHAREs). These are regular expressions with a very simple structure: they basically consist of the concatenation of factors, where each factor is a disjunction of strings, possibly extended with “

Conjunctive query containment over trees

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