Formal Models of Web Queries

Summary: Introduce a formal model for Web queries that captures navigational access patterns and the absence of concurrency control, and analyze how these features alter query computability. Propose the Web calculus, an abstraction/extension of WebSQL, to guide Web query language design. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1110
Venue: PODS
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 9.5891634e-05
Overall Rank: 1,869 | 87.18%
DOI: 10.1145/263661.263677

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Alberto O. Mendelzon (University of Toronto)
2. Tova Milo (Tel Aviv University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{mendelzon_pods97,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '97},
        title = {{Formal Models of Web Queries}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/263661.263677},
        doi = {10.1145/263661.263677},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Mendelzon, Alberto O. and Milo, Tova},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
160	Integration of Heterogeneous Databases Without Common Domains Using Queries Based on Textual Similarity	1998	SIGMOD	0.0002802209
1,233	Semistructured Data	1997	PODS	0.00011562468
2,446	Querying Semantic Web Data with SPARQL	2011	PODS	8.5728114e-05
2,708	Cut and Paste	1997	PODS	8.2272626e-05
4,495	Queries with Incomplete Answers over Semistructured Data	1999	PODS	6.6623097e-05
6,838	Distributed Computation of Web Queries using Automata	2002	PODS	5.757764e-05
8,618	Complex Queries over Web Repositories	2003	VLDB	5.4001665e-05
9,153	Positive Active XML	2004	PODS	5.3130241e-05
11,419	Equitable Top-k Results for Long Tail Data	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
124	A Query Language and Optimization Techniques for Unstructured Data	1996	SIGMOD	0.00030950263
571	From Structured Documents to Novel Query Facilities	1994	SIGMOD	0.0001632382
573	W3QS: A Query System for the World-Wide Web	1995	VLDB	0.00016290377
1,001	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB	0.00012714843
4,833	BigSur: A System For the Management of Earth Science Data	1995	VLDB	6.4869775e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	12,577	Optimization of Multi-Domain Queries on the Web	2008	VLDB
2	8,120	Formal Semantics and Analysis of Object Queries	2003	SIGMOD
3	4,139	Foundations of Semantic Web Databases	2004	PODS
4	2,832	Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language	2010	SIGMOD
5	12,756	Database-Inspired Search	2005	VLDB
6	3,497	Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Data	2009	CIDR
7	9,043	A Layered Architecture for Querying Dynamic Web Content	1999	SIGMOD
8	8,618	Complex Queries over Web Repositories	2003	VLDB
9	747	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS
10	6,369	Capturing and Querying Multiple Aspects of Semistructured Data	1999	VLDB