On the Equivalence of XML Patterns

  • Authors:
  • Peter T. Wood

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • CL '00 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computational Logic
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Patterns for matching parts of XML documents are used in a number of areas of XML document management: in links between documents, in templates for document transformation, and in queries for document retrieval. The W3C has defined XSLT patterns as a common sub-language for all these applications. We study the equivalence problem for XSLT patterns by defining a logic-based data model for XML and a semantics for XSLT patterns in terms of Datalog programs. Although uniform equivalence of Datalog programs is not sufficient to capture the equivalence of programs derived from XSLT patterns, we nevertheless show that equivalence can be decided by a variant of the chase process using embedded tuple-generating dependencies. One advantage of this approach is that the method can easily be extended to determine equivalence when documents are known to satisfy constraints imposed by document type definitions.