research-article

BonXai: Combining the Simplicity of DTD with the Expressiveness of XML Schema

Authors:

Matthias Niewerth,

Thomas SchwentickAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 42, Issue 3

Article No.: 15, Pages 1 - 42

https://doi.org/10.1145/3105960

Published: 24 August 2017 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 Documents are notoriously difficult. In this article, we introduce the XML specification language BonXai, which incorporates many features of XML Schema but is arguably almost as easy to use as 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 not to replace XML Schema but rather to provide a simpler alternative for users who want to go beyond the expressiveness and features of DTD but do not need the explicit use of types. Furthermore, XML Schema processing tools can be used as a back-end for BonXai, since BonXai can be automatically converted into XML Schema. A particularly strong point of BonXai is its solid foundation rooted in a decade of theoretical work around pattern-based schemas. We present a formal model for a core fragment of BonXai and the translation algorithms to and from a core fragment of XML Schema. We prove that BonXai and XML Schema can be converted back-and-forth on the level of tree languages and we formally study the size trade-offs between the two languages.

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Index Terms

BonXai: Combining the Simplicity of DTD with the Expressiveness of XML Schema
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web data description languages
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory
    1. Regular languages
    2. Tree languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems

ACM Transactions on Database Systems Volume 42, Issue 3

Invited Paper from SIGMOD 2015, Invited Paper from PODS 2015, Regular Papers and Technical Correspondence

September 2017

220 pages

ISSN:0362-5915

EISSN:1557-4644

DOI:10.1145/3129336

Editor:
Christian S. Jensen
Aalborg University, Denmark

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 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].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 24 August 2017

Accepted: 01 June 2017

Revised: 01 May 2017

Received: 01 December 2015

Published in TODS Volume 42, Issue 3

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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Emmy Noether Nachwuchsgruppe)
Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)
Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under the FET-Open grant agreement FOX

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1609/aaai.v37i4.25606
Bruyère VPérez GStaquet G(2023)Validating Streaming JSON Documents with Learned VPAsTools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_14(271-289)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-30823-9_14
Martens WLibkin LBarceló P(2022)Towards Theory for Real-World DataProceedings of the 41st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3517804.3526066(261-276)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3526066
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