A Decision Procedure for XPath Satisfiability in the Presence of DTD Containing Choice

Abstract. XPath satisfiability is one of the most basic problems of XML query optimization. A satisfiability decision framework, named SAT-DTD, is proposed to determine, given a set of XPath queries P and a DTD τ, which subset of P are satisfiable by an XML tree conforming to DTD τ. In the framework, an indexed NFA is constructed from the set of XPath queries P, and then the NFA is driven by simple API for DTD (SAD, something like SAX) events, derived from DTD τ, to evaluate the predicates in P and to decide the satisfiability of P. Especially, DTD choice (i.e. '|' operator) is taken into consideration, and an algorithm, named SAT-DTD_C, which bases on SAT-DTD, is put forward to determine the unsatisfiability caused by DTD choice. At last, the complexity of the algorithms is analyzed, and the correctness of the algorithms is tested by experiments