A Normal Form for XML Documents

Summary: Defines path-based functional dependencies for XML via a relational encoding and shows these FDs cause redundancy and update anomalies in XML documents. Proposes XML Normal Form (XNF) that generalizes BCNF and nested-relation normal forms and gives a lossless algorithm to convert any DTD into XNF. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1253
Venue: PODS
Year: 2002
Pagerank: 0.00010043595
Overall Rank: 1,671 | 88.54%
DOI: 10.1145/543613.543625

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Marcelo Arenas (University of Toronto)
2. Leonid Libkin (AT&T; University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{arenas_pods02,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '02},
        title = {{A Normal Form for XML Documents}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/543613.543625},
        doi = {10.1145/543613.543625},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Arenas, Marcelo and Libkin, Leonid},
        year = {2002}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,324	Dependencies for Graphs	2017	PODS	8.7506505e-05
2,973	Functional Dependencies for Graphs	2016	SIGMOD	7.9083516e-05
3,201	Apples and Oranges: A Comparison of RDF Benchmarks and Real RDF Datasets	2011	SIGMOD	7.6419269e-05
3,432	An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data	2003	PODS	7.4182332e-05
4,822	Colorful XML: One Hierarchy Isn't Enough	2004	SIGMOD	6.4919484e-05
5,271	Incomplete Data: What Went Wrong, and How to Fix It	2014	PODS	6.2907571e-05
6,771	Efficient Discovery of XML Data Redundancies	2006	VLDB	5.7783105e-05
8,417	XML Schema Mappings	2009	PODS	5.4288691e-05
8,419	Ontology-based Entity Matching in Attributed Graphs	2019	VLDB	5.4282511e-05
9,347	RRXS: Redundancy reducing XML storage in relations	2003	VLDB	5.2843327e-05
10,538	Structural Normalization of Property Graphs	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,678	Structural Generalizability: The Case of Similarity Search	2021	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,414	When Data Dependencies over SQL Tables Meet the Logics of Paradox and S-3	2010	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,555	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
12,625	The Complexity of Reasoning about Pattern-based XML Schemas	2007	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,679	On Redundancy vs Dependency Preservation in Normalization: An Information-Theoretic Study of 3NF	2006	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,726	Differential Constraints	2005	PODS	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

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,417	XML Schema Mappings	2009	PODS
2	12,555	Relational-Style XML Query	2008	SIGMOD
3	4,167	Integrity Constraints for XML	2000	PODS
4	12,679	On Redundancy vs Dependency Preservation in Normalization: An Information-Theoretic Study of 3NF	2006	PODS
5	9,347	RRXS: Redundancy reducing XML storage in relations	2003	VLDB
6	1,056	A Normal Form for Nested Relations	1985	PODS
7	12,055	SQL Schema Design: Foundations, Normal Forms, and Normalization	2016	SIGMOD
8	6,516	The Design of non-1NF Relational Databases into Nested Normal Form	1987	SIGMOD
9	6,771	Efficient Discovery of XML Data Redundancies	2006	VLDB
10	3,432	An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data	2003	PODS