Inference of XML Integrity Constraints

• Thesis title in Czech: Inference of XML Integrity Constraints
• Thesis title in English: Inference of XML Integrity Constraints
• Key words: XML, ID atributy, odvozování
• English key words: XML, ID attributes, inference
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2010/2011
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Software Engineering (32-KSI)
• Supervisor: doc. RNDr. Irena Holubová, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 02.11.2010
• Date of assignment: 02.11.2010
• Date and time of defence: 30.01.2012 10:00
• Date of electronic submission: 25.11.2011
• Date of submission of printed version: 30.11.2011
• Date of proceeded defence: 30.01.2012
• Opponents: RNDr. Tomáš Knap, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Currently there exists a plenty of papers dealing with inference of XML schemas of XML documents. However, most of these approaches focus on inference of structural aspects, whereas others are often omitted. In particular, both DTD and XML Schema languages involve ID and IDREF(S) data types that specify unique identifiers and references to them. XML Schema extends this feature using unique, key and keyref constructs that have the same purpose but enable one to specify the unique/key values more precisely. In addition, its assert and report constructs enable one to express specific constraints on values using XPath language. And there are also more general integrity constraints that could be inferred, though they cannot be expressed in the existing schema specification languages so far.
The aim of this work is a research on various aspects of the problem of (semi)automatic inference of various integrity constraints of XML data. Firstly, it is necessary to analyze existing solutions and to discuss their advantages and disadvantages. The core of the work is a proposal and implementation of own approach facing selected disadvantages of the existing ones. The work will include suitable experimental results.

References

Mlynkova, I. - Necasky, M. - Pokorny, J. - Richta, K. - Toman, K. - Toman, V.: Technologie XML - Principy a aplikace v praxi. Grada Publishing, Prague, Czech Republic, zari 2008. ISBN 978-80-247-2725-7.

W3C. W3C Technical Reports and Publications. http://www.w3.org/TR/

Mlynkova, I.: An Analysis of Approaches to XML Schema Inference. SITIS '08, Bali, Indonesia, November/December 2008. IEEE Computer Society Press, 2008.

Fassetti. F. - Fazzinga, B.: FOX: Inference of Approximate Functional Dependencies from XML Data. In DEXA'07, pages 10-14, Washington, DC, USA, 2007. IEEE.

Shiu, H. - Fong, J. - Biuk-Aghai, R. P.: Reverse Engineering XML Documents Into DTD Graph With SAX. WSEAS Transactions on Computers, 5(6):1236-1241, 2006.

Barbosa, D. - Mendelzon, A.: Finding ID Attributes in XML Documents. Database and XML Technologies, Volume 2824, pages 180-194. Springer, 2003.

Yu, C. - Jagadish, H. V.: XML Schema Refinement Through Redundancy Detection and Normalization. The VLDB Journal, 17(2):203-223, 2007.

Opocenska, K. - Kopecky, M.: Incox - a Language for XML Integrity Constraints Description. In DATESO'08, pages 1-12. CEUR-WS.org, 2008.

Fan, W.: XML Constraints: Specification, Analysis, and Applications. In DEXA'05, pages 805-809, IEEE, 2005.

Object Constraint Language (OCL) http://www-st.inf.tu-dresden.de/ocl/