Towards Verifying Semistructured Data

Abstract

Semistructured data is now widely used in both web applications and database systems. There are many research challenges in this area, such as data integration, change management, view definition, and data normalization. Traditionally in these areas a formalism is defined for the database model, and properties of the algorithms can be reasoned about, such as the dependency preserving property of the normalization algorithm in the relational data model. Because research into semistructured data is still in its infancy, many algorithms have been defined in this area and a number of formalisms have been proposed but there is no widely accepted formalism that is generally accepted to reason about the properties of the algorithms. Such a formalism must capture all the necessary semantics required to model the algorithms, should not be too complex, and should be easy to use.