On the expressiveness of probabilistic XML models

  • Authors:
  • Serge Abiteboul;Benny Kimelfeld;Yehoshua Sagiv;Pierre Senellart

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA Saclay, Île-de-France, Orsay, France and Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France;IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, USA;Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel;Institut Télécom, Télécom ParisTech, CNRS LTCI, Paris, France

  • Venue:
  • The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Various known models of probabilistic XML can be represented as instantiations of the abstract notion of p-documents. In addition to ordinary nodes, p-documents have distributional nodes that specify the possible worlds and their probabilistic distribution. Particular families of p-documents are determined by the types of distributional nodes that can be used as well as by the structural constraints on the placement of those nodes in a p-document. Some of the resulting families provide natural extensions and combinations of previously studied probabilistic XML models. The focus of the paper is on the expressive power of families of p-documents. In particular, two main issues are studied. The first is the ability to (efficiently) translate a given p-document of one family into another family. The second is closure under updates, namely, the ability to (efficiently) represent the result of updating the instances of a p-document of a given family as another p-document of that family. For both issues, we distinguish two variants corresponding to value-based and object-based semantics of p-documents.