XPath and XQuery

Lecturer: Prof. Michael Benedikt (Oxford University, Oxford, UK).

About the lecturer | Course Summary | Scribe notes | Assignment (DEADLINE MOVED!)

About the lecturer: Michael Benedikt received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Wisconsin, working in model theory under the direction of H. J. Keisler. He was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories for many years, in both the Software Production Research Department (in Naperville, Illinois) and the Network and Data Services Research Department (in Murray Hill, NJ). His research has ranged from finite model theory, database theory, and software verification to database He is currently Professor of Computing Science at Oxford University, and is a fellow of University College.

Course summary: XPath and XQuery are w3c standard languages for querying XML documents. The full languages allow one to perform arbitrary computation, but at the core of each language is a limited special-purpose language with attractive theoretical properties. The course will cover XPath and XQuery from a theoretical perspective. The first part will cover XPath 1.0. It will deal with the expressiveness of fragments of XPath 1.0, basic complexity results, and static analysis problems. The second part of the course will cover XQuery, focusing on expressiveness issues and on mapping between XQuery and relational languages. The course will be fairly self-contained, but familiarity with first-order predicate logic is a must. Some very basic knowledge of temporal logic and tree automata will be useful as well.

Scribe notes

Assignment: [PDF] due May 22, 2008, see instructions in pdf file.