Trees, automata and XML

ABSTRACT

Formal languages play an important role for many aspects of XML processing. This is obvious for type specifications (as DTD) which use context-free grammars and for navigation in documents (as in XPath) which is based on regular expressions. But the investigation of query, typing, navigation and transformation languages for XML has used many more concepts from Formal Language Theory, in particular many different kinds of string and tree automata.The close connection between automata and logics helps to allow a declarative specification of queries and transformations that can be evaluated or performed by tree automata. This connection also facilitates the investigation of the expressive power of query and transformation languages. Furthermore, in many cases automata characterizations enable static analysis like containment and satisfiability tests for queries or type checking for transformations.The tutorial will give a gentle introduction into the connections between XML languages and various kinds of automata and it will survey some classical and recent results in this area.