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Effective characterizations of tree logics

Published:09 June 2008Publication History

ABSTRACT

A survey of effective characterizations of tree logics. If L is a logic, then an effective characterization for L is an algorithm, which inputs a tree automaton and replies if the recognized language can be defined by a formula in L. The logics L considered include path testable languages, frontier testable languages, fragments of Core XPath, and fragments of monadic second-order logic.

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References

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          Kamal Lodaya

          Like regular languages of words, regular languages of trees are exactly those that can be defined using formulas of monadic second-order logic. But many useful tree logics-and subclasses of regular tree languages-can be defined that are not as powerful; those definable in first-order logic are an obvious example. Just as Codd's theorem relates first-order logic to the expressive power of SQL-type query languages, languages definable using first-order logic over trees are related to the expressive power of Extensible Markup Language (XML) query languages like XPath. Relatively little is known about this world of tree queries, and Bojańczyk's paper is a masterly survey of what is known and what is open. I recommend it highly to graduate students and other researchers in the area. Online Computing Reviews Service

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM Conferences
            PODS '08: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
            June 2008
            330 pages
            ISBN:9781605581521
            DOI:10.1145/1376916

            Copyright © 2008 ACM

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 9 June 2008

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