A Logical Foundation for XML

• Authors: Mengchi Liu
• Venue: CAiSE '02 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
• Year: 2002

XML is fast emerging as the dominant standard for data representation and exchange on the World Wide Web. How to view an XML document, i.e., XML data model, and how to query XML documents are two primary research issues for XML. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a novel data model for XML that allows us to view XML data in a way similar to complex object data models. Based on this data model, we then investigate how rule-based paradigm can be used to query XML documents and what benefits it brings over existing XML query languages. To this end, we present a rule-based query language called XML-RL, in which we treat existing XML documents as extensional databases, and the queries and functions expressed in rules as intensional databases as in deductive databases. We show that the querying part and result constructing part in XMLRL are strictly separated, the rule body is used to query XML documents and bind variables while the rule head is used to construct the resulting XML document. As several rules can be used for the same query, complex queries can be expressed in XML-RL in a simple and natural way as in logic programming. Also, rules provide a uniform framework for both functions/methods and queries and support recursion in a natural way. Finally, rule-based framework has a formal logic foundation that is lacking in other query languages.