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Nested Sibling Tree Automata

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2009

Françoise Gire  and
Jean-Marc Talbot
Françoise Gire
Affiliation:
Université de Paris I, Centre de Recherche en Informatique Paris Cedex 13, France. [email protected]
Jean-Marc Talbot
Affiliation:
Université de Provence, LIF Marseille France. [email protected]
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Abstract

In the XML standard, data are represented as unranked labeledordered trees. Regular unranked tree automata provide a usefulformalism for the validation of schemas enforcing regular structuralconstraints on XML documents. However some concrete applicationcontexts need the expression of more general constraints than theregular ones. In this paper we propose a new framework in whichcontext-free style structural constraints can be expressed andvalidated. This framework is characterized by: (i) the introductionof a new notion of trees, the so-called typed unranked labeledtrees (tulab trees for short) in which each node receivesone of three possible types (up, down or fix), and (ii) thedefinition of a new notion of tree automata, the so-callednested sibling tulab tree automata, able to enforcecontext-free style structural constraints on tulab tree languages.During their structural control process, such automata are usingvisibly pushdown languages of words [R. Alur and P. Madhusudan, Visibly pushdown languages, 36th ACM symposium on Theory of Computing, Chicago, USA (2004) 202–211] on theiralphabet of states. We show that the resulting class NSTL oftulab tree languages recognized by nested sibling tulab treeautomata is robust, i.e. closed under Boolean operations and withdecision procedures for the classical membership, emptiness andinclusion problems. We then give three characterizations of NSTL :a logical characterization by defining an adequate logic in whichNSTL happens to coincide with the models of monadic second ordersentences; the two other characterizations are using adequateencodings and map together languages of NSTL with some regularsets of 3-ary trees or with particular sets of binary trees.

Keywords

Automatalogicunranked treesXML schemas.
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 379 - 402
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2008

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