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Containment for XPath Fragments under DTD Constraints

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Database Theory — ICDT 2003 (ICDT 2003)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2572))

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Abstract

The containment and equivalence problems for various fragments of XPath have been studied by a number of authors. For some fragments, deciding containment (and even minimisation) has been shown to be in PTIME, while for minor extensions containment has been shown to be CONP-complete. When containment is with respect to trees satisfying a set of constraints (such as a schema or DTD), the problem seems to be more difficult. For example, containment under DTDs is CONP-complete for an XPath fragment denoted XP for which containment is in PTIME. It is also undecidable for a larger class of XPath queries when the constraints are so-called simple XPath integrity constraints (SXICs). In this paper, we show that containment is decidable for an important fragment of XPath, denoted XP{[ ],*,//}, when the constraints are DTDs. We also identify XPath fragments for which containment under DTDs can be decided in PTIME.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Birkbeck College, University of London, London

    Peter T. Wood

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  1. Peter T. Wood
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italy

    Diego Calvanese  & Maurizio Lenzerini  & 

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Room 474 Gates Computer Science Building 4B, 94305-9045, Stanford, CA, USA

    Rajeev Motwani

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Wood, P.T. (2003). Containment for XPath Fragments under DTD Constraints. In: Calvanese, D., Lenzerini, M., Motwani, R. (eds) Database Theory — ICDT 2003. ICDT 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2572. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36285-1_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36285-1_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00323-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36285-2

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