The expressivity of XPath with transitive closure

  • Authors:
  • Balder ten Cate

  • Affiliations:
  • Universiteit van Amsterdam

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-fifth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We extend Core XPath, the navigational fragment of XPath 1.0, with transitive closure and path equalities. The resulting language, Regular XPATH≈, is expressively complete for FO* (first-order logic extended with a transitive closure operator that can be applied to formulas with exactly two free variables). As a corollary, we obtain that Regular XPATH≈ is closed under path intersection and complementation. We also provide characterizations for the *-positive fragment of Regular XPATH≈, and for μRegular XPATH (the extension of Regular XPATH≈ with least fixed points).