593 research outputs found
An Inflationary Fixed Point Operator in XQuery
We introduce a controlled form of recursion in XQuery, inflationary fixed
points, familiar in the context of relational databases. This imposes
restrictions on the expressible types of recursion, but we show that
inflationary fixed points nevertheless are sufficiently versatile to capture a
wide range of interesting use cases, including the semantics of Regular XPath
and its core transitive closure construct.
While the optimization of general user-defined recursive functions in XQuery
appears elusive, we will describe how inflationary fixed points can be
efficiently evaluated, provided that the recursive XQuery expressions exhibit a
distributivity property. We show how distributivity can be assessed both,
syntactically and algebraically, and provide experimental evidence that XQuery
processors can substantially benefit during inflationary fixed point
evaluation.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 2 table
Reasoning & Querying – State of the Art
Various query languages for Web and Semantic Web data, both for practical use and as an area of research in the scientific community, have emerged in recent years. At the same time, the broad adoption of the internet where keyword search is used in many applications, e.g. search engines, has familiarized casual users with using keyword queries to retrieve information on the internet. Unlike this easy-to-use querying, traditional query languages require knowledge of the language itself as well as of the data to be queried. Keyword-based query languages for XML and RDF bridge the gap between the two, aiming at enabling simple querying of semi-structured data, which is relevant e.g. in the context of the emerging Semantic Web. This article presents an overview of the field of keyword querying for XML and RDF
On the Complexity of Nonrecursive XQuery and Functional Query Languages on Complex Values
This paper studies the complexity of evaluating functional query languages
for complex values such as monad algebra and the recursion-free fragment of
XQuery.
We show that monad algebra with equality restricted to atomic values is
complete for the class TA[2^{O(n)}, O(n)] of problems solvable in linear
exponential time with a linear number of alternations. The monotone fragment of
monad algebra with atomic value equality but without negation is complete for
nondeterministic exponential time. For monad algebra with deep equality, we
establish TA[2^{O(n)}, O(n)] lower and exponential-space upper bounds.
Then we study a fragment of XQuery, Core XQuery, that seems to incorporate
all the features of a query language on complex values that are traditionally
deemed essential. A close connection between monad algebra on lists and Core
XQuery (with ``child'' as the only axis) is exhibited, and it is shown that
these languages are expressively equivalent up to representation issues. We
show that Core XQuery is just as hard as monad algebra w.r.t. combined
complexity, and that it is in TC0 if the query is assumed fixed.Comment: Long version of PODS 2005 pape
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
Development of Use Cases, Part I
For determining requirements and constructs appropriate for a Web query language, or in fact
any language, use cases are of essence. The W3C has published two sets of use cases for XML
and RDF query languages. In this article, solutions for these use cases are presented using
Xcerpt. a novel Web and Semantic Web query language that combines access to standard Web
data such as XML documents with access to Semantic Web metadata
such as RDF resource
descriptions with reasoning abilities and rules familiar from logicprogramming.
To the
best knowledge of the authors, this is the first in depth study of how to solve use cases for
accessing XML and RDF in a single language: Integrated access to data and metadata
has been
recognized by industry and academia as one of the key challenges in data processing for the
next decade. This article is a contribution towards addressing this challenge by demonstrating
along practical and recognized use cases the usefulness of reasoning abilities, rules, and
semistructured
query languages for accessing both data (XML) and metadata
(RDF)
The XML Query Language Xcerpt: Design Principles, Examples, and Semantics
Most query and transformation languages developed since the mid 90es for XML and semistructured data—e.g. XQuery [1], the precursors of XQuery [2], and XSLT [3]—build upon a path-oriented node selection: A node in a data item is specified in terms of a root-to-node path in the manner of the file selection languages of operating systems. Constructs inspired from the regular expression constructs , +, ?, and “wildcards” give rise to a flexible node retrieval from incompletely specified data items.
This paper further introduces into Xcerpt, a query and transformation language further developing an alternative approach to querying XML and semistructured data first introduced with the language UnQL [4]. A metaphor for this approach views queries as patterns, answers as data items matching the queries. Formally, an answer to a query is defined as a simulation [5] of an instance of the query in a data item
XQuery Streaming by Forest Transducers
Streaming of XML transformations is a challenging task and only very few
systems support streaming. Research approaches generally define custom
fragments of XQuery and XPath that are amenable to streaming, and then design
custom algorithms for each fragment. These languages have several shortcomings.
Here we take a more principles approach to the problem of streaming
XQuery-based transformations. We start with an elegant transducer model for
which many static analysis problems are well-understood: the Macro Forest
Transducer (MFT). We show that a large fragment of XQuery can be translated
into MFTs --- indeed, a fragment of XQuery, that can express important features
that are missing from other XQuery stream engines, such as GCX: our fragment of
XQuery supports XPath predicates and let-statements. We then rely on a
streaming execution engine for MFTs, one which uses a well-founded set of
optimizations from functional programming, such as strictness analysis and
deforestation. Our prototype achieves time and memory efficiency comparable to
the fastest known engine for XQuery streaming, GCX. This is surprising because
our engine relies on the OCaml built in garbage collector and does not use any
specialized buffer management, while GCX's efficiency is due to clever and
explicit buffer management.Comment: Full version of the paper in the Proceedings of the 30th IEEE
International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2014
- …