Path-Oriented Queries and Tree Inclusion Problem

Abstract

With the rapid advance of the Internet, management of structured documents such as XML documents has become more and more important (Marchiori, 1998). As a simplified version of SGML, XML is recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, 1998a; World Wide Web Consortium, 1998b) as a document description meta-language to exchange and manipulate data and documents on the WWW. It has been used to code various types of data in a wide range of application domains, including a Chemical Markup Language for exchanging data about molecules, the Open Financial Exchange for swapping financial data between banks and banks and customers, as well as a Geographical Markup Language for searching geographical information (Bosak, 1997; Zhang & Gruenwald, 2001). Also, a growing number of legacy systems are adapted to output data in the form of XML documents.