A Unifying Approach to Validating Specification-Oriented XML Constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we present a unifying approach to specifying and verifying specification-oriented XML constraints. The formal tree model and the XML constraint logic are developed to describe the XML documents and constraints respectively. The XML constraint logic, as an extension of the first order logic, is constructed and interpreted in the framework of our formal tree model, where the node domain and value domain for XML are separated rigorously. Furthermore, an effective algorithm is given to establish the satisfaction of the logic formulas with respect to the corresponding tree model. We implement a tool and the experiments are carried out for the standard XMLbased specifications from industry, such as WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, and WSDL. The experimental results show that our approach is effective in practice.