Mu-Calculus Based Resolution of XPath Decision Problems

XPath is the standard declarative notation for navigating XML data and returning a set of matching nodes. In the context of XSLT/XQuery analysis, query optimization, and XML type checking, XPath decision problems arise naturally. They notably include XPath containment (whether or not for any tree the result of a particular query is included in the result of a second one), and XPath satisfiability (whether or not an expression yields a non-empty result), in the presence (or the absence) of XML DTDs. In this paper, we propose a unifying logic for XML, namely the alternation-free modal mu-calculus with converse. We show how to translate major XML concepts such as XPath and DTDs into this logic. Based on these embeddings, we show how XPath decision problems can be solved using a state-of-the-art EXPTIME decision procedure for mu-calculus satisfiability. We provide preliminary experiments which shed light, for the first time, on the cost of solving XPath decision problems in practice

RUN, Xtatic, RUN: EFFICIENT IMPLEMENTATION OF AN OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGE WITH REGULAR PATTERN MATCHING

Schema languages such as DTD, XML Schema, and Relax NG have been steadily growing in importance in the XML community. A schema language provides a mechanism for defining the type of XML documents; i.e., the set of constraints that specify the structure of XML documents that are acceptable as data for a certain programming task. A number of recent language designs—many of them descended from the XDuce language of Hosoya, Pierce, and Vouillon—have showed how such schemas can be used statically for type-checking XML processing code and dynamically for evaluation of XML structures. The technical foundation of such languages is the notion of regular types, a mild generalization of nondeterministic top-down tree automata, which correspond to a core of most popular schema notations, and the no-tion of regular patterns—regular types decorated with variable binders—a powerful and convenient primitive for dynamic inspection of XML values. This dissertation is concerned with one of XDuce’s descendants, Xtatic. The goal of the Xtatic project is to bring the regular type and regular pattern technologies to a wide audience by integrating them with a mainstream object-oriented language. My research focuses on an efficient implementation of Xtatic including a compiler that generates fast and compact target program

Type-based Optimization for Regular Patterns

Pattern matching mechanisms based on regular expressions feature in a number of recent languages for processing XML. The flexibility of these mechanisms demands novel approaches to the familiar problems of pattern-match compilation---how to minimize the number of tests performed during pattern matching while keeping the size of the output code small