The Complexity of Query Containment in Expressive Fragments of XPath 2.0

Summary: Complexity map for CoreXPath+{intersection,equality,complementation,for‑loops,TC}: cases range EXPTIME, 2‑EXPTIME, to non‑elementary. Intersection typically adds one exponential; equality/TC usually inert (TC makes downward+intersection EXPSPACE→2‑EXPTIME); complementation/for‑loops cause non‑elementary; results extend to DTDs and satisfiability. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1416
Venue: PODS
Year: 2007
Pagerank: 6.6592957e-05
Overall Rank: 4,504 | 69.10%
DOI: 10.1145/1265530.1265541

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Balder ten Cate (University of Amsterdam)
2. Carsten Lutz (Technical University of Dresden)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{cate_pods07,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '07},
        title = {{The Complexity of Query Containment in Expressive Fragments of XPath 2.0}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1265530.1265541},
        doi = {10.1145/1265530.1265541},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Cate, Balder ten and Lutz, Carsten},
        year = {2007}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,641	High-Performance Complex Event Processing over XML Streams	2012	SIGMOD	6.5913488e-05
6,442	XPath, Transitive Closure Logic, and Nested Tree Walking Automata	2008	PODS	5.8776391e-05
9,249	Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World	2019	PODS	5.2987261e-05
10,044	The (Almost) Complete Guide to Tree Pattern Containment	2015	PODS	5.1703259e-05
12,365	The Complexity of Text-Preserving XML Transformations	2011	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
395	Containment and Equivalence for an XPath Fragment [Extended Abstract]	2002	PODS	0.00019298983
1,564	Conjunctive Queries over Trees	2004	PODS	0.00010349456
1,916	XPath Satisfiability in the Presence of DTDs	2005	PODS	9.4878711e-05
3,711	The Expressivity of XPath with Transitive Closure*	2006	PODS	7.1778094e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

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5	3,711	The Expressivity of XPath with Transitive Closure*	2006	PODS
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7	9,249	Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World	2019	PODS
8	1,916	XPath Satisfiability in the Presence of DTDs	2005	PODS
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