Which DTDs are Streaming Bounded Repairable?

Gabriele Puppis (1) , Cristian Riveros (2) , Pierre Bourhis (3)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 Department of Computer Science [Oxford]
3 Computing Science Laboratory - Oxford University

Integrity constraint management concerns both checking whether data is valid and taking action to restore correctness when invalid data is discovered. In XML the notion of valid data can be captured by schema languages such as Document Type Definitions (DTDs) and more generally XML schemas. DTDs have the property that constraint checking can be done in streaming fashion. In this paper we consider when the corresponding action to restore validity -- repair -- can be done in streaming fashion. We formalize this as the problem of determining, given a DTD, whether or not a streaming procedure exists that transforms an input document so as to satisfy the DTD, using a number of edits independent of the document. We show that this problem is decidable. In fact, we show the decidability of a more general problem, allowing a more general class of schemas than DTDs, and requiring a repair procedure that works only for documents that are already known to satisfy another class of constraints. The decision procedure relies on a new analysis of the structure of DTDs, reducing to a novel notion of game played on pushdown systems associated with the schemas.

Domaines: Théorie et langage formel [cs.FL]

Gabriele Puppis, Cristian Riveros, Pierre Bourhis. Which DTDs are Streaming Bounded Repairable?. International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), Mar 2013, Genoa, Italy. pp.57-68, ⟨10.1145/2448496.2448505⟩. ⟨hal-00829423⟩