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