Semantic validation for XML updates

Abstract

For data centric XML data, updates bring the problem of validation that the updated data must conform to both structural and semantic constraints according to XML schemas. Most existing XML validation works today are concentrated on structural constraints with respect to DTD and XML. Schema (XSD). However, because DTD/XSD schema is too limited to express complex data semantics, they cannot be used to validate semantic constraints in XML. Meanwhile, there are few works concentrated on how to validate semantic constraints. In this paper, we investigate ORA-SS [16], a rich semantic data model, for XML data. We derive a set of important semantic constraints with respect to the data semantics in ORA-SS model including nary relationship types (n≥2), relationship attributes, object IDs and ID references, and semantic dependencies, etc, which cannot be captured by DTD/XSD schema. Then, we discuss how to validate these semantic constraints in XML updates with the help of ORASS.