research-article

BonXai: Combining the simplicity of DTD with the expressiveness of XML Schema

Authors:

Matthias Niewerth,

Thomas SchwentickAuthors Info & Claims

PODS '15: Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems

Pages 145 - 156

https://doi.org/10.1145/2745754.2745774

Published: 20 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

While the migration from DTD to XML Schema was driven by a need for increased expressivity and flexibility, the latter was also significantly more complex to use and understand. Whereas DTDs are characterized by their simplicity, XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) are notoriously difficult. In this paper, we introduce the XML specification language BonXai which possesses most features of XSDs, including its expressivity, while retaining the simplicity of DTDs. In brief, the latter is achieved by sacrificing the explicit use of types in favor of simple patterns expressing contexts for elements. The goal of BonXai is by no means to replace XML Schema, but rather to provide a simpler DTD-like alternative to schema designers that do not need the explicit use of types. Therefore, BonXai can be seen as a practical front-end for XML Schema. A particular strong point of BonXai is its solid foundation rooted in a decade of theoretical work around pattern-based schemas. We present in detail the formal model for BonXai and discuss translation algorithms to and from XML Schema.

References

[1]

G. J. Bex, F. Neven, and J. Van den Bussche. DTDs versus XML Schema: A practical study. In International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), pages 79--84, 2004.

Digital Library

[2]

A. Brüggemann-Klein and D. Wood. One-unambiguous regular languages. Information and Computation, 142(2):182--206, 1998.

Digital Library

[3]

P. Caron, Y. Han, and L. Mignot. Generalized one-unambiguity. In International Conference on Developments in Language Theory (DLT), pages 129--140, 2011.

Digital Library

[4]

C. S. Coen, P. Marinelli, and F. Vitali. Schemapath, a minimal extension to XML Schema for conditional constraints. In International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), pages 164--174, 2004.

Digital Library

[5]

W. Czerwi\'nski, W. Martens, and T. Masopust. Efficient separability of regular languages by subsequences and suffixes. In International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), pages 150--161, 2013.

Digital Library

[6]

DSD. Document structure description (DSD). http://www.brics.dk/DSD/, 2002.

[7]

A. Ehrenfeucht and H. P. Zeiger. Complexity measures for regular expressions. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 12(2):134--146, 1976.

Digital Library

[8]

D. Fiorello, N. Gessa, P. Marinelli, and F. Vitali. DTD

[9]

2.0: Adding support for co-constraints. In Extreme Markup Languages, 2004.

[10]

S. Gao, C. Sperberg-McQueen, H. Thompson, N. Mendelsohn, D. Beech, and M. Maloney. W3C XML Schema definition language (XSD) 1.1 part 1: Structures. www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-xmlschema11--1--20120405/, April 2012.

[11]

W. Gelade and F. Neven. Succinctness of pattern-based schema languages for XML. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 77(3):505--519, 2011.

Digital Library

[12]

P. Hofman and W. Martens. Separability by short subsequences and subwords. In International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), 2015.

[13]

G. Kasneci and T. Schwentick. The complexity of reasoning about pattern-based XML schemas. In International Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), pages 155--164, 2007.

Digital Library

[14]

K. Losemann, W. Martens, and M. Niewerth. Descriptional complexity of deterministic regular expressions. In International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), pages 643--654, 2012.

Digital Library

[15]

W. Martens, V. Mattick, M. Niewerth, S. Agarwal, N. Douib, O. Garbe, D. Günther, D. Oliana, J. Kroniger, F. Lücke, T. Melikoglu, K. Nordmann, G. Özen, T. Schlitt, L. Schmidt, J. Westhoff, and D. Wolff. Design of the BonXai schema language. Available at www.theoinf.uni-bayreuth.de/ download/bonxai-spec.pdf, Manuscript 2014.

[16]

W. Martens, F. Neven, M. Niewerth, and T. Schwentick. Developing and analyzing XSDs through bonXai. International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 5(12):1994--1997, 2012.

Digital Library

[17]

W. Martens, F. Neven, and T. Schwentick. Simple off the shelf abstractions of XML Schema. Sigmod RECORD, 36(3):15--22, 2007.

Digital Library

[18]

W. Martens, F. Neven, T. Schwentick, and G. J. Bex. Expressiveness and complexity of XML Schema. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 31(3):770--813, 2006.

Digital Library

[19]

W. Martens and J. Niehren. On the minimization of XML Schemas and tree automata for unranked trees. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 73(4):550--583, 2007.

Digital Library

[20]

A. Møller and M. Schwartzbach. An introduction to XML and web technologies. Addison-Wesley, 2006.

Digital Library

[21]

M. Murata, D. Lee, M. Mani, and K. Kawaguchi. Taxonomy of XML schema languages using formal language theory. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 5(4):660--704, 2005.

Digital Library

[22]

T. Place, L. van Rooijen, and M. Zeitoun. Separating regular languages by piecewise testable and unambiguous languages. In International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), pages 729--740, 2013.

[23]

RelaxNG. Relax NG specification. http://www.relaxng.org/spec-20011203.html, 2001.

[24]

Schematron. Schematron. http://www.schematron.com/, 1999.

[25]

C. Sperberg-McQueen and H. Thompson. XML Schema. http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema, 2005.

Cited By

Gayo JPrud’hommeaux EBoneva IKontokostas D(2022)Validating RDF DataundefinedOnline publication date: 23-Mar-2022
Li YChen HZhang LHuang BZhang J(2020)Inferring Restricted Regular Expressions with Interleaving from Positive and Negative SamplesAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-3-030-47436-2_58(769-781)Online publication date: 11-May-2020
Bai LJia ZLiu J(2018)Transformation of fuzzy spatiotemporal data from XML to object-oriented databaseEarth Science Informatics10.1007/s12145-018-0342-x11:3(449-461)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2018
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

BonXai: Combining the simplicity of DTD with the expressiveness of XML Schema
1. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Query languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Theory and algorithms for application domains
    1. Database theory
      1. Database query languages (principles)

Recommendations

BonXai: Combining the Simplicity of DTD with the Expressiveness of XML Schema
Invited Paper from SIGMOD 2015, Invited Paper from PODS 2015, Regular Papers and Technical Correspondence

While the migration from DTD to XML Schema was driven by a need for increased expressivity and flexibility, the latter was also significantly more complex to use and understand. Whereas DTDs are characterized by their simplicity, XML Schema Documents ...
A New XML Schema based on Type Dependencies
IDEAS '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium

In XML Schema, the type definition mechanism is responsible for defining types as well as passing contextual information, which may cause some design problems such as artificial types. This paper proposes a new kind of XML schema called Type ...
Extracting differences between regular tree grammars
SAC '13: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

An XML document is usually stored with its schema so that the structural consistency of the document is ensured. In general, schemas are continuously updated according to changes in real world. Thus, we have to precisely know how a schema is updated to ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PODS '15: Proceedings of the 34th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems

May 2015

358 pages

ISBN:9781450327572

DOI:10.1145/2745754

General Chair:
Tova Milo
Tel Aviv University, Israel
,
Program Chair:
Diego Calvanese
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Copyright © 2015 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 the author(s) 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].

Sponsors

SIGMOD: ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 May 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Conference

SIGMOD/PODS'15

Sponsor:

SIGMOD

SIGMOD/PODS'15: International Conference on Management of Data

May 31 - June 4, 2015

Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

PODS '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 80 submissions, 31%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 642 of 2,707 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
182
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 03 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Gayo JPrud’hommeaux EBoneva IKontokostas D(2022)Validating RDF DataundefinedOnline publication date: 23-Mar-2022
Li YChen HZhang LHuang BZhang J(2020)Inferring Restricted Regular Expressions with Interleaving from Positive and Negative SamplesAdvances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1007/978-3-030-47436-2_58(769-781)Online publication date: 11-May-2020
Bai LJia ZLiu J(2018)Transformation of fuzzy spatiotemporal data from XML to object-oriented databaseEarth Science Informatics10.1007/s12145-018-0342-x11:3(449-461)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2018
Martens WNeven FNiewerth MSchwentick T(2017)BonXaiACM Transactions on Database Systems10.1145/310596042:3(1-42)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2017
Masopust TKrötzsch M(2017)Deciding Universality of ptNFAs is PSpace-CompleteSOFSEM 2018: Theory and Practice of Computer Science10.1007/978-3-319-73117-9_29(413-427)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2017

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents