Efficient Static Analysis of XML Paths and Types

Pierre Genevès (1, 2) , Nabil Layaïda (2) , Alan Schmitt (3)

1 EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2 WAM - Web, adaptation and multimedia
3 SARDES - System architecture for reflective distributed computing environments

A new logic for reasoning over finite trees is proposed. This logic currently offers the best balance known between expressivity and complexity for decidability. It is as expressive as monadic second-order logic whereas its satisfiability is shown decidable in time complexity 2^O(n) w.r.t. size n of the formula. We present an effective algorithm in practice using symbolic techniques (BDDs), and use it for the static analysis of XPath queries in the presence of regular tree types, including XPath typing.

Keywords: static analysis; containment; query; equivalence; satisfiability; xml; path; xpath; types; logic

Domains: Programming Languages [cs.PL]; Databases [cs.DB]; Web

Pierre Genevès, Nabil Layaïda, Alan Schmitt. Efficient Static Analysis of XML Paths and Types. Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, Jun 2007, San Diego, United States. pp.342--351, ⟨10.1145/1250734.1250773⟩. ⟨hal-00189123⟩