research-article

Simplifying XML schema: effortless handling of nondeterministic regular expressions

Authors:

Frank NevenAuthors Info & Claims

SIGMOD '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data

Pages 731 - 744

https://doi.org/10.1145/1559845.1559922

Published: 29 June 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Whether beloved or despised, XML Schema is momentarily the only industrially accepted schema language for XML and is unlikely to become obsolete any time soon. Nevertheless, many nontransparent restrictions unnecessarily complicate the design of XSDs. For instance, complex content models in XML Schema are constrained by the infamous unique particle attribution (UPA) constraint. In formal language theoretic terms, this constraint restricts content models to deterministic regular expressions. As the latter constitute a semantic notion and no simple corresponding syntactical characterization is known, it is very difficult for non-expert users to understand exactly when and why content models do or do not violate UPA. In the present paper, we therefore investigate solutions to relieve users from the burden of UPA by automatically transforming nondeterministic expressions into concise deterministic ones defining the same language or constituting good approximations. The presented techniques facilitate XSD construction by reducing the design task at hand more towards the complexity of the modeling task. In addition, our algorithms can serve as a plug-in for any model management tool which supports export to XML Schema format.

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Cited By

Mou XChen HLi Y(2019)Context-Free Grammars for Deterministic Regular Expressions with InterleavingTheoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 201910.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14(235-252)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14
Wang XChen H(2018)Inferring Deterministic Regular Expression with CountingConceptual Modeling10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_15(184-199)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_15
Martens WNeven FNiewerth MSchwentick T(2017)BonXaiACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/310596042:3(1-42)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3105960
Show More Cited By

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Simplifying XML schema: effortless handling of nondeterministic regular expressions

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGMOD '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data

June 2009

1168 pages

ISBN:9781605585512

DOI:10.1145/1559845

Editors:
Carsten Binnig,
Benoit Dageville,
General Chairs:
Uğur Çetintemel
Brown University, USA
,
Stan Zdonik
Brown University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Donald Kossmann
ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 June 2009

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SIGMOD/PODS '09: International Conference on Management of Data

June 29 - July 2, 2009

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Cited By

Mou XChen HLi Y(2019)Context-Free Grammars for Deterministic Regular Expressions with InterleavingTheoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 201910.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14(235-252)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14
Wang XChen H(2018)Inferring Deterministic Regular Expression with CountingConceptual Modeling10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_15(184-199)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_15
Martens WNeven FNiewerth MSchwentick T(2017)BonXaiACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/310596042:3(1-42)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3105960
Lu PPeng FChen HZheng L(2015)Deciding determinism of unary languagesInformation and Computation10.1016/j.ic.2015.08.005245:C(181-196)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ic.2015.08.005
Lu PBremer JChen H(2015)Deciding Determinism of Regular LanguagesTheory of Computing Systems10.1007/s00224-014-9576-257:1(97-139)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00224-014-9576-2
Freydenberger DKötzing T(2015)Fast Learning of Restricted Regular Expressions and DTDsTheory of Computing Systems10.1007/s00224-014-9559-357:4(1114-1158)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00224-014-9559-3
Latte MNiewerth M(2015)Definability by Weakly Deterministic Regular Expressions with Counters is DecidableMathematical Foundations of Computer Science 201510.1007/978-3-662-48057-1_29(369-381)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48057-1_29
Peng FChen H(2015)Discovering Restricted Regular Expressions with InterleavingWeb Technologies and Applications10.1007/978-3-319-25255-1_9(104-115)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25255-1_9
Arenas MDaenen JNeven FUgarte MBussche JVansummeren S(2014)Discovering XSD Keys from XML DataACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/263854739:4(1-49)Online publication date: 30-Dec-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2638547
Dixon M(2013)A Graphical Based Approach to the Conceptual Modeling, Validation and Generation of XML Schema DefinitionsInternational Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering10.4018/jitwe.20130101018:1(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.4018/jitwe.2013010101
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