Maarten Marx

Variable-free reasoning on finite trees

Vendredi 7 novembre 2003 à 14 heures

Bureau 314 de l'Irit

Résumé : Reasoning about finite ordered trees is becoming very important with the advent of the new data storage format XML. XPath is the most widely used language to retrieve data from XML documents. We show the close connection between XPath and various well investigated variable free formalisms interpreted on trees: Kleene algebras with tests, propositional dynamic logic, since/until temporal logic. We present an extension of XPath which can express all first-order definable queries over ordered trees. We give a linear time algorithm for query evaluation for a language which extends XPath with all regular expressions and tests over the four basic axes. We give an EXPTIME decision algorithm which can be used to decide equivalence of a large number of XPath expressions given a set of constraints (eg, an XML schema definition or a document type definition (DTD).

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