Consistently Updating XML Documents Using Incremental checks With XQueries

When updating a valid XML Data or Schema, an efficient yet light-weight mechanism is needed to determine if the update would invalidate the document. Towards this goal, we have developed a framework called SAXE. First, we analyzed the constraints expressed in XML schema specifications to establish constraint rules that must be observed when a schema or an XML data conforming to a given XML Schema is altered. We then classify the rules based on their relevancy for a given update case. That is, we show the minimal set of rules that must be checked to guarantee the safety for each update primitive. Next, we illustrate that this set of incremental constraint checks can be specified using generic XQuery expressions composed of three type of components. Safe updates for the XML data have the following components: (1) XML schema meta-queries to retrieve any con-straint knowledge potentially relevant to the given update from the schema or XMl data being altered, (2) retrieval of specific characteristics from the to-be-modified XML, and (3) lastly an analysis of information collected about the XML schema and the affected XML document to determine validity of the update. For the safe schema alteration, the components are: (1) XML schema meta-queries to retrieve relevant information from the schema (2)analysis and usage of retrieved information to update the schema, and lastly to (3) propagate the changes to the XML data when necessary. As a proof of concept, we have established a library of these generic XQuery constraint checks for the type-related XML constraints. The key idea of SAXE is to rewrite each XQuery update into a safe XML Query by extending it with appropriate constraint check subqueries. This en-hanced XML update query can then safely be executed using any existing XQuery engine that supports updates - thus turning any update engine automatically into an incremen-tal constraint-check engine. In order to verify the feasibility of our approach, we have implemented a prototype system SAXE that generates safe XQuery updates. Our experimental evaluation assesses the overhead of rewriting as well as the relative performance of our loosely-coupled incremental constraint check approach against the more traditional first-change-document and then revalidate-it approach

Incremental Interpretation: Applications, Theory, and Relationship to Dynamic Semantics

Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent boundaries, possibly word by word. However, possible computational applications have received less attention. In this paper we consider various potential applications, in particular graphical interaction and dialogue. We then review the theoretical and computational tools available for mapping from fragments of sentences to fully scoped semantic representations. Finally, we tease apart the relationship between dynamic semantics and incremental interpretation.Comment: Procs. of COLING 94, LaTeX (2.09 preferred), 8 page

Transformation As Search

In model-driven engineering, model transformations are con- sidered a key element to generate and maintain consistency between re- lated models. Rule-based approaches have become a mature technology and are widely used in different application domains. However, in var- ious scenarios, these solutions still suffer from a number of limitations that stem from their injective and deterministic nature. This article pro- poses an original approach, based on non-deterministic constraint-based search engines, to define and execute bidirectional model transforma- tions and synchronizations from single specifications. Since these solely rely on basic existing modeling concepts, it does not require the intro- duction of a dedicated language. We first describe and formally define this model operation, called transformation as search, then describe a proof-of-concept implementation and discuss experiments on a reference use case in software engineering

Incremental Cardinality Constraints for MaxSAT

Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) is an optimization variant of the Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problem. In general, MaxSAT algorithms perform a succession of SAT solver calls to reach an optimum solution making extensive use of cardinality constraints. Many of these algorithms are non-incremental in nature, i.e. at each iteration the formula is rebuilt and no knowledge is reused from one iteration to another. In this paper, we exploit the knowledge acquired across iterations using novel schemes to use cardinality constraints in an incremental fashion. We integrate these schemes with several MaxSAT algorithms. Our experimental results show a significant performance boost for these algo- rithms as compared to their non-incremental counterparts. These results suggest that incremental cardinality constraints could be beneficial for other constraint solving domains.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Final version published in Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) 201

Threads and Or-Parallelism Unified

One of the main advantages of Logic Programming (LP) is that it provides an excellent framework for the parallel execution of programs. In this work we investigate novel techniques to efficiently exploit parallelism from real-world applications in low cost multi-core architectures. To achieve these goals, we revive and redesign the YapOr system to exploit or-parallelism based on a multi-threaded implementation. Our new approach takes full advantage of the state-of-the-art fast and optimized YAP Prolog engine and shares the underlying execution environment, scheduler and most of the data structures used to support YapOr's model. Initial experiments with our new approach consistently achieve almost linear speedups for most of the applications, proving itself as a good alternative for exploiting implicit parallelism in the currently available low cost multi-core architectures.Comment: 17 pages, 21 figures, International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2010