XPath Queries Research Articles

Efficient rewriting of XPath queries using Query Set Specifications

We study the problem of querying XML data sources that accept only a limited set of queries, such as sources accessible by Web services which can implement very large (potentially infinite) families of XPath queries. To compactly specify such families of queries we adopt the Query Set Specifications [14], a formalism close to context-free grammars. We say that query Q is expressible by the specification P if it is equivalent to some expansion of P . Q is supported by P if it has an equivalent rewriting using some finite set of P 's expansions. We study the complexity of expressibility and support and identify large classes of XPath queries for which there are efficient (PTIME) algorithms. Our study considers both the case in which the XML nodes in the results of the queries lose their original identity and the one in which the source exposes persistent node ids.

A bi-labeling based XPath processing system

We present BLAS, a Bi-LAbeling based XPath processing System. BLAS uses two labeling schemes to speed up query processing: P-labeling for processing consecutive child (or parent) axis traversals, and D-labeling for processing descendant (or ancestor) axis traversals. XML data are stored in labeled form and indexed. Algorithms are presented for translating XPath queries to SQL expressions. BLAS reduces the number of joins in the SQL query translated from a given XPath query and reduces the number of disk accesses required to execute the SQL query compared with the traditional XPath processing using D-labeling alone. We also propose an approximate P-labeling scheme and the corresponding query translation algorithm to handle XML data trees that contain a large number of distinct tag names, and/or are very deep. This extension captures a spectrum of XPath-to-SQL query translation schemes, ranging from existing schemes that do not use P-labels to the one that uses exact P-labels. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the BLAS system.

Worst-case optimal algorithm for XPath evaluation over XML streams

We consider the XPath evaluation problem: Evaluate an XPath query Q on a streaming XML document D; i.e., determine the set Q ( D ) of document elements selected by Q. We mainly consider Conjunctive XPath queries that involve only the child and descendant axes. Previously known in-memory algorithms for this problem use O ( | D | ) space and O ( | Q | | D | ) time. Several previously known algorithms for the streaming version use Ω ( d n ) space and Ω ( d n | D | ) time in the worst case; d denotes the depth of D, and n denotes the number of location steps in Q. Their exponential space requirement could well exceed the O ( | D | ) space used by the in-memory algorithms. We present an efficient algorithm that uses O ( d | Q | + n c ) space and O ( ( | Q | + d n ) | D | ) time in the worst case; c denotes the maximum number of elements of D that can be candidates for output, at any one instant. For some worst case Q and D, the memory space used by our algorithm matches our lower bound proved in a different paper; so, our algorithm uses optimal memory space in the worst case.

Lower bounds for processing data with few random accesses to external memory

We consider a scenario where we want to query a large dataset that is stored in external memory and does not fit into main memory. The most constrained resources in such a situation are the size of the main memory and the number of random accesses to external memory. We note that sequentially streaming data from external memory through main memory is much less prohibitive. We propose an abstract model of this scenario in which we restrict the size of the main memory and the number of random accesses to external memory, but admit arbitrary sequential access. A distinguishing feature of our model is that it allows the usage of unlimited external memory for storing intermediate results, such as several hard disks that can be accessed in parallel. In this model, we prove lower bounds for the problem of sorting a sequence of strings (or numbers), the problem of deciding whether two given sets of strings are equal, and two closely related decision problems. Intuitively, our results say that there is no algorithm for the problems that uses internal memory space bounded by N 1−ε and at most o (log N ) random accesses to external memory, but unlimited “streaming access”, both for writing to and reading from external memory. (Here, N denotes the size of the input and ε is an arbitrary constant greater than 0.) We even permit randomized algorithms with one-sided bounded error. We also consider the problem of evaluating database queries and prove similar lower bounds for evaluating relational algebra queries against relational databases and XQuery and XPath queries against XML-databases.

Efficient Filtering of Branch Queries for High-Performance XML Data Services

Efficient XML filtering has been the fundamental technique in recent Web service and XML publish/subscribe applications. In this article, we consider the problem of filtering a streaming XML data efficiently against a large number of branch XPath queries. To improve the performance of XML filtering, branch queries are grouped into similar queries, and the common paths between queries in the same group are identified. After performing structural matching of queries, queries are organized in a way that multiple queries can be evaluated simultaneously in the post-processing phase. In the post-processing phase, join operations are executed in a pipeline fashion, and intermediate join results are shared amongst the queries in the same group. As a result, the total number of join operations performed in the post-processing phase is significantly reduced. In addition, we also present how to efficiently return all matching elements for each matching branch query. Experiments show that our proposal is efficient and scalable compared to previous work.

Information disclosure by answers to XPath queries

We consider information disclosure caused by answering queries to an XML database. We introduce an audit framework to determine ‘suspicious’ user queries, i.e. those queries that returned results being sufficient to derive disclosed secret informatio

Query translation from XPath to SQL in the presence of recursive DTDs

We study the problem of evaluating xpath queries over xml data that is stored in an rdbms via schema-based shredding. The interaction between recursion (descendants-axis) in xpath queries and recursion in dtds makes it challenging to answer xpath queries using rdbms. We present a new approach to translating xpath queries into sql queries based on a notion of extended XP ath expressions and a simple least fixpoint (lfp) operator. Extended xpath expressions are a mild extension of xpath, and the lfp operator takes a single input relation and is already supported by most commercial rdbms. We show that extended xpath expressions are capable of capturing both dtd recursion and xpath queries in a uniform framework. Furthermore, they can be translated into an equivalent sequence of sql queries with the lfp operator. We present algorithms for rewriting xpath queries over a (possibly recursive) dtd into extended xpath expressions and for translating extended xpath expressions to sql queries, as well as optimization techniques. The novelty of our approach consists in its capability to answer a large class of xpath queries by means of only low-end rdbms features already available in most rdbms, as well as its flexibility to accommodate existing relational query optimization techniques. In addition, these translation algorithms provide a solution to query answering for certain (possibly recursive) xml views of xml data. Our experimental results verify the effectiveness of our techniques.

Selectivity-sensitive shared evaluation of multiple continuous XPath queries over XML streams

One of the primary issues confronting XML message brokers is the difficulty associated with processing a large set of continuous XPath queries over incoming XML streams. This paper proposes a novel system designed to present an effective solution to this problem. The proposed system transforms multiple XPath queries before their run-time into a new data structure, called an XP- table, by sharing their common constraints. An XP-table is matched with a stream relation ( SR) transformed from a target XML stream by a SAX parser. This arrangement is intended to minimize the run-time workload of continuous query processing. In addition, an early-query-termination strategy is proposed as an improved alternative to the basic approach. It optimizes query processing by arranging the evaluation sequence of the member-lists (m-lists) of an XP-table adaptively and offers increased efficiency, especially in cases of low selectivity. System performance is estimated and verified through a variety of experiments, including comparisons with previous approaches such as YFilter and LazyDFA. The proposed system is practically linear-scalable and stable for evaluating a set of XPath queries in a continuous and timely fashion.

XCube: Processing XPath queries in a hypercube overlay network

In this paper, we present the design and performance of XCube, a tag-based system for managing XML data in a hypercube overlay network. In XCube, each node in a d-dimensional hypercube is identified by a d-bit vector. A peer manages a smaller hypercube with dimension d′ < d. An XML document is compactly represented as a structure summary and a content summary. The structure summary comprises a d-bit vector derived from the distinct tag names in the document and a synopsis capturing the structure of the document. The content summary consists of a bit map that summarizes the document content. The metadata of a document, i.e., owner IP, document identifier, structure summary and content summary, is indexed at its anchor peer (the peer that manages the node with matching bit vector). In addition, the structure summary is further indexed at all peers that manages nodes whose bit vectors are covered by the document’s bit vector. An XPath query is processed in four phases. In phase 1, the query is routed to its anchor peer according to the bit vector of the query. In phase 2, the query is evaluated against all the synopses stored in its anchor peer and forwarded to the anchor peers of the matching synopses. In phase 3, the anchor peer of each related synopsis examines the query on the related bit maps and forwards the query to the related owner peers. Finally in phase 4, the owner peers evaluate the query on the XML documents and return answers to the querying peer. We also present a scheme that dynamically partitions the hypercube to balance the load across peers. We further exploit the partition history to remove redundant messages. We conduct a comprehensive experimental study and the results show the efficiency of XCube.

XPath leashed

This survey gives an overview of formal results on the XML query language XPath. We identify several important fragments of XPath, focusing on subsets of XPath 1.0. We then give results on the expressiveness of XPath and its fragments compared to other formalisms for querying trees, algorithms, and complexity bounds for evaluation of XPath queries, as well as static analysis of XPath queries.

Consistent collective evaluation of multiple continuous queries for filtering heterogeneous data streams

Query processing for a data stream should also be continuous and rapid. This article proposes a novel approach for consistent collective evaluation of multiple continuous queries for filtering two different types of data streams: a relational stream and an XML stream. The proposed approach commonly provides region-based selection constructs: an attribute selection construct for relational queries and a path selection construct for XPath queries. Both collectively evaluate the selection predicates of the same attribute (path), based on the precomputed matching results of the queries in each of the disjoint regions divided by the selection predicates. The performance experiments show that the proposed approach is practically more efficient and stable than other approaches at run-time.

Information disclosure by answers to XPath queries

We consider information disclosure caused by answering queries to an XML database. We introduce an audit framework to determine suspicious user queries, i.e. those queries that returned results bei...

A methodology for coupling fragments of XPath with structural indexes for XML documents

We introduce a new methodology for coupling language-induced partitions and index-induced partitions on XML documents that is aimed for the benefit of efficient evaluation of XPath queries. In particular, we identify XPath fragments which are ideally coupled with the newly introduced P ( k ) -partition which has its definition grounded in the well-known A ( k ) structural index and its associated partition. We then utilize these couplings to investigate fundamental questions about the use of structural indexes in XPath query evaluation.

An Efficient Bottom-up Filtering of XML Messages by Exploiting the Postfix Commonality of XPath Queries

Recently, for more efficient filtering of XML data, YFilter system has been suggested to exploit the prefix commonalities that exist among path expressions. Sharing the prefix commonality gives the benefit of improving filtering performance through the tremendous reduction in filtering machine size. However, exploiting the postfix commonality can also be useful for an XML filtering situation. For example, when a stream of XML messages does not have any defined schema, or users cannot remember the defined schema exactly, users often use the partial matching path queries which begins with the descendant axis (“//”), e.g., '//science/article/title', '//entertainment/article/title', and '//title'. If so, the registered XPath queries are most likely to have the postfix commonality, e.g., the sample queries share the partial path expressions 'article/title' and 'title'. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a bottom-up filtering approach exploiting the postfix commonality against the top-down approach of YFilter exploiting the prefix commonality. Some experimental results show that our method has better filtering performance when registered XPath queries mainly consist of the partial matching path queries with the postfix commonality.

Optimizing the execution of XSLT stylesheets for querying transformed XML data

We have to deal with different data formats whenever data formats evolve or data must be integrated from heterogeneous systems. These data when implemented in XML for data exchange cannot be shared freely among applications without data transformation. A common approach to solve this problem is to convert the entire XML data from their source format to the applications’ target formats using the transformations rules specified in XSLT stylesheets. However, in many cases, not all XML data are required to be transformed except for a smaller part described by a user’s query (application). In this paper, we present an approach that optimizes the execution time of an XSLT stylesheet for answering a given XPath query by modifying the XSLT stylesheet in such a way that it would (a) capture only the parts in the XML data that are relevant to the query and (b) process only those XSLT instructions that are relevant to the query. We prove the correctness of our optimization approach, analyze its complexity and present experimental results. The experimental results show that our approach performs the best in terms of execution time, especially when many cost-intensive XSLT instructions can be excluded in the XSLT stylesheet.

A fuzzy extension of the XPath query language

Today the current state of the art in querying XML data is represented by XPath and XQuery, both of which rely on Boolean conditions for node selection. Boolean selection is too restrictive when users do not use or even know the data structure precisely, e.g. when queries are written based on a summary rather than on a schema. In this paper we describe a XML querying framework, called FuzzyXPath, based on Fuzzy Set Theory, which relies on fuzzy conditions for the definition of flexible constraints on stored data. A function called “deep-similar” is introduced to replace XPath’s typical “deep-equal” function. The main goal is to provide a degree of similarity between two XML trees, assessing whether they are similar both structure-wise and content-wise. Several query examples are discussed in the field of XML based metadata for e-learning.

Query Processing and Optimization Techniques over Streamed Fragmented XML

With the extensive use of XML in applications over the Web, efficient query processing over streaming XML has become a core challenge due to one-pass processing and limited resources. Taking advantage of Hole-Filler model for XML fragments, this paper proposes a hybrid structure (FQ-Index) for both the queries and fragments, and proposes an XML fragment processing algorithm to evaluate forward XPath queries over streamed XML fragments. Two optimization rules, dependence pruning and prefix pruning are also developed. Dependence pruning scheme prunes off the dependent operations caused by fragmentation and transforms the queries for XML tag into queries for XML fragments, while prefix pruning scheme prunes off the "redundant" prefix along the path according to the tag structure. The effectiveness of the techniques developed is illustrated with a detailed set of experiments.

On the minimization of XPath queries

XPath expressions define navigational queries on XML data and are issued on XML documents to select sets of element nodes. Due to the wide use of XPath, which is embedded into several languages for querying and manipulating XML data, the problem of efficiently answering XPath queries has received increasing attention from the research community. As the efficiency of computing the answer of an XPath query depends on its size, replacing XPath expressions with equivalent ones having the smallest size is a crucial issue in this direction. This article investigates the minimization problem for a wide fragment of XPath (namely X P [✶] ), where the use of the most common operators (child, descendant, wildcard and branching) is allowed with some syntactic restrictions. The examined fragment consists of expressions which have not been specifically studied in the relational setting before: neither are they mere conjunctive queries (as the combination of “//” and “*” enables an implicit form of disjunction to be expressed) nor do they coincide with disjunctive ones (as the latter are more expressive). Three main contributions are provided. The “global minimality” property is shown to hold: the minimization of a given XPath expression can be accomplished by removing pieces of the expression, without having to re-formulate it (as for “general” disjunctive queries). Then, the complexity of the minimization problem is characterized, showing that it is the same as the containment problem. Finally, specific forms of XPath expressions are identified, which can be minimized in polynomial time.

A bottom-up algorithm for query decomposition

In order to access data from various data repositories, in Global-As-View approaches an input query is decomposed into several subqueries. Normally, this decomposition is based on a set of mappings, which describe the correspondence of data elements between a global schema and local ones. However, building mappings is a difficult task, especially when the number of participating local schemas is large. In our approach, an input query is automatically decomposed into subqueries without using mappings. An algorithm is proposed to transform a global path expression (e.g. an XPath query) into local path expressions executable in local schemas. This algorithm considers parts of a path expression from right to left, that is, the algorithm traverses from the bottom to the top of a schema tree depending on the structure of local schemas. Compared to top-down approaches, such as by Lausen and Marron, our algorithm can reduce the time for forming subqueries for local (e.g. XML) schemas to a large extent.

XFIS: an XML filtering system based on string representation and matching

Information-filtering systems constitute a critical component of modern information-seeking applications. As the number of users grows and the amount of information available becomes even bigger, it is imperative to employ scalable and efficient representation and filtering techniques. Typically, the use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) representation entails profile representation with the use of the XPath query language and the employment of efficient heuristic techniques for constraining the complexity of the filtering mechanism. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique for matching user profiles that is based on the use of holistic twig-matching algorithms and is more effective, in terms of time and space complexities, in comparison with previous techniques. The proposed algorithm is able to handle order matching of user profiles, while its main positive aspect is the envisaging of a representation based on Prufer sequences that permits the effective investigation of node relationships. Experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous algorithms in XML filtering both in space and time aspects.