Containment and Equivalence for an XPath Fragment [Extended Abstract]

Summary: Containment/equivalence for an XPath fragment with branching, label wildcards, and descendant axes: show containment becomes coNP-complete (contrasting prior two-feature tractability). Give an EXPTIME sound-and-complete algorithm, identify parameterized PTIME islands and coNP-hard bounded cases, and propose a fast sound-but-incomplete practical procedure. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1251
Venue: PODS
Year: 2002
Pagerank: 0.00019298983
Overall Rank: 395 | 97.30%
DOI: 10.1145/543613.543623

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Gerome Miklau (University of Washington)
2. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{miklau_pods02,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '02},
        title = {{Containment and Equivalence for an XPath Fragment [Extended Abstract]}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/543613.543623},
        doi = {10.1145/543613.543623},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Miklau, Gerome and Suciu, Dan},
        year = {2002}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 43 of 43 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
666	Efficient Algorithms for Processing XPath Queries	2002	VLDB	0.00015166582
1,916	XPath Satisfiability in the Presence of DTDs	2005	PODS	9.4878711e-05
2,268	Efficient Query Reformulation in Peer Data Management Systems	2004	SIGMOD	8.8370676e-05
2,616	FleXPath: Flexible Structure and Full-Text Querying for XML	2004	SIGMOD	8.339188e-05
2,658	A Framework for Using Materialized XPath Views in XML Query Processing	2004	VLDB	8.287535e-05
2,680	Efficient Algorithms for Minimizing Tree Pattern Queries	2002	SIGMOD	8.267202e-05
2,817	On the minimization of XPath queries	2003	VLDB	8.0945626e-05
3,167	From Tree Patterns to Generalized Tree Patterns: On Efficient Evaluation of XQuery	2003	VLDB	7.6749991e-05
3,711	The Expressivity of XPath with Transitive Closure*	2006	PODS	7.1778094e-05
3,976	Rewriting XPath Queries Using Materialized Views	2005	VLDB	6.9785468e-05
4,066	Twig2Stack: Bottom-up Processing of Generalized-Tree-Pattern Queries over XML Documents	2006	VLDB	6.9298871e-05
4,504	The Complexity of Query Containment in Expressive Fragments of XPath 2.0	2007	PODS	6.6592957e-05
4,537	On Testing Satisfiability of Tree Pattern Queries	2004	VLDB	6.6417534e-05
5,006	iTrails: Pay-as-you-go Information Integration in Dataspaces	2007	VLDB	6.4034229e-05
5,237	Query Caching and View Selection for XML Databases	2005	VLDB	6.3037813e-05
5,360	Lazy Query Evaluation for Active XML	2004	SIGMOD	6.2487273e-05
5,936	Rewriting Nested XML Queries Using Nested Views	2006	SIGMOD	6.0353909e-05
6,005	Minimization of Tree Pattern Queries with Constraints	2008	SIGMOD	6.0119945e-05
6,185	Containment of Nested XML Queries	2004	VLDB	5.9488248e-05
6,492	Safe Data Sharing and Data Dissemination on Smart Devices	2005	SIGMOD	5.8640469e-05
6,917	Query Efficiency in Probabilistic XML Models	2008	SIGMOD	5.7400564e-05
7,267	Structured Materialized Views for XML Queries	2007	VLDB	5.6597556e-05
8,130	Maintaining XPath Views in Loosely Coupled Systems	2006	VLDB	5.4819552e-05
8,416	Materialized View Selection for XQuery Workloads	2012	SIGMOD	5.429311e-05
8,547	Satisfiability and Relevance for Queries over Active Documents	2009	PODS	5.4119882e-05
8,550	Conditional XPath, the first order complete XPath dialect*	2004	PODS	5.4119882e-05
8,941	Client-Based Access Control Management for XML documents	2004	VLDB	5.3483178e-05
9,012	Towards Theory for Real-World Data	2022	PODS	5.3323444e-05
9,661	PAXQuery: Parallel Analytical XML Processing	2015	SIGMOD	5.2409648e-05
9,679	Cooperative XPath Caching	2008	SIGMOD	5.2365126e-05
9,687	Answering Tree Pattern Queries Using Views	2006	VLDB	5.2351299e-05
9,811	Schema-Based Query Optimisation for Graph Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.214913e-05
10,044	The (Almost) Complete Guide to Tree Pattern Containment	2015	PODS	5.1703259e-05
11,835	Containment of Shape Expression Schemas for RDF	2019	PODS	5.093636e-05
11,928	Data Citation: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due	2018	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,030	Minimization of Tree Pattern Queries	2016	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,325	Answering Queries using Views over Probabilistic XML: Complexity and Tractability	2012	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,383	Generating Efficient Execution Plans for Vertically Partitioned XML Databases	2011	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,534	Efficient Rewriting of XPath Queries Using Query Set Specifications	2009	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,628	Reasoning about XML Update Constraints	2007	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,684	Structural Characterizations of the Semantics of XPath as Navigation Tool on a Document	2006	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,797	Answering XPath Queries over Networks by Sending Minimal Views	2004	VLDB	5.093636e-05
12,799	The NEXT Framework for Logical XQuery Optimization	2004	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	12,491	Satisfiability of Downward XPath with Data Equality Tests	2009	PODS
2	1,564	Conjunctive Queries over Trees	2004	PODS
3	8,440	On XPath with Transitive Axes and Data Tests	2013	PODS
4	6,185	Containment of Nested XML Queries	2004	VLDB
5	1,916	XPath Satisfiability in the Presence of DTDs	2005	PODS
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9	9,249	Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World	2019	PODS
10	4,504	The Complexity of Query Containment in Expressive Fragments of XPath 2.0	2007	PODS