XML Transformation Language Based on Monadic Second Order Logic

Although monadic second-order logic (MSO) has been a foundation of XML queries, little work has attempted to take MSO formulae themselves as a programming construct. Indeed, MSO formulae are capable of expressing (1) all regular queries, (2) deep matching without explicit recursion, (3) queries in a “don’t-care semantics” for unmentioned nodes, and (4) n-ary queries for locating n-tuples of nodes. While previous frameworks for subtree extraction (path expressions, pattern matches, etc.) each had some of these properties, none has satisfied all of them. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a practical XML transformation language called MTran that fully exploits the expressiveness of MSO. MTran is a language based on “select-andtransform” templates similar in spirit to XSLT. However, we design our templates specially suitable for expressing structure-preserving transformation, eliminating the need for explicit recursive calls to be written. Moreover, we allow templ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: PLANX
• Authors: Kazuhiro Inaba, Haruo Hosoya
• Keywords: MSO Formulae, N-ary Mso Queries, N-ary Queries, PLANX 2007, Programming Languages