XPath processing in a nutshell

ABSTRACT

We provide a concise yet complete formal definition of the semantics of XPath 1 and summarize efficient algorithms for processing queries in this language. Our presentation is intended both for the reader who is looking for a short but comprehensive formal account of XPath as well as the software developer in need of material that facilitates the rapid implementation of XPath engines.

REFERENCES

• 1: A. Deutsch and V. Tannen. Containment and Integrity Constraints for XPath. In Proc. KRDB 2001, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 45, 2001.
• 2: Georg Gottlob , Christoph Koch, Monadic Queries over Tree-Structured Data, Proceedings of the 17th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, p.189-202, July 22-25, 2002
• 3: G. Gottlob, C. Koch, and R. Pichler. "Efficient Algorithms for Processing XPath Queries". In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'02), Hong Kong, China, Aug. 2002.
• 4: G. Gottlob, C. Koch, and R. Pichler. "XPath Query Evaluation: Improving Time and Space Efficiency". In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'03), Bangalore, India, Mar. 2003. to appear.
• 5: Gerome Miklau , Dan Suciu, Containment and equivalence for an XPath fragment, Proceedings of the twenty-first ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems, June 03-05, 2002, Madison, Wisconsin [doi>10.1145/543613.543623]
• 6: P. Wadler. "Two Semantics for XPath", 2000. Draft paper available at http://www.research.avayalabs.com/user/wadler/.
• 7: P. Wadler. "A Formal Semantics of Patterns in XSLT". In Markup Technologies, Philadelphia, December 1999. Revised version in Markup Languages, MIT Press, June 2001.
• 8: Peter T. Wood, On the Equivalence of XML Patterns, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computational Logic, p.1152-1166, July 01, 2000
• 9: World Wide Web Consortium. DOM Specification http://www.w3c.org/DOM/.
• 10: World Wide Web Consortium. XML Path Language (XPath) Recommendation. http://www.w3c.org/TR/xpath/, Nov. 1999.
• 11: World Wide Web Consortium. "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition)", Oct. 2000. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.
• 12: World Wide Web Consortium. "XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics. W3C Working Draft Aug. 16th 2002, 2002. http://www.w3.org/TR/query-algebra/.