τJSONPath: A Temporal Extension of the JSONPath Language for the τJSchema Framework

Abstract

JSONPath is a language for locations in a standard JSON document, like the XPath language for XML documents. Its definition is based on the specification of the standard JSON format. Moreover, many JSON query languages, like JSONiq, have been inspired from JSONPath. However, JSONPath allows to navigate only in the current version of a JSON document, since it does not support temporal aspects. Besides, as several modern platforms, like IoT-based applications, cloud computing, and e-health systems, are creating, accessing, updating, and querying temporal JSON documents, it will be interesting to have a temporal query language that allows locating and retrieving temporal JSON data from such documents. Moreover, the state-of-the-art of JSON data management does not include any temporal JSON query language. Hence, to fill this gap, we propose in this paper τJSONPath (Temporal JSONPath), a temporal extension of JSONPath, to query time-varying JSON documents in our temporal JSON framework τJSchema. τJSONPath extends both the syntax and the semantics of JSONPath to support transaction time. We also provide some examples to motivate and illustrate our proposal.