Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World

Summary: Compile thousands of real-world XPath queries and match them to literature's decidable fragments, exposing coverage gaps once practical features (free variables, data tests/joins, last(), id()) are included. Provide new decidability/undecidability results and extended fragments to better capture real-world XPath. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1779
Venue: PODS
Year: 2019
Pagerank: 5.2987261e-05
Overall Rank: 9,249 | 36.55%
DOI: 10.1145/3294052.3319685

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. David Baelde (CNRS; INRIA; University of Paris; École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay)
2. Anthony Lick (CNRS; INRIA; University of Paris; École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay)
3. Sylvain Schmitz (CNRS; INRIA; University of Paris; École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{baelde_pods19,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '19},
        title = {{Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3294052.3319685},
        doi = {10.1145/3294052.3319685},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Baelde, David and Lick, Anthony and Schmitz, Sylvain},
        year = {2019}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,012	Towards Theory for Real-World Data	2022	PODS	5.3323444e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
79	XMark: A Benchmark for XML Data Management	2002	VLDB	0.00036555628
530	An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs	2018	VLDB	0.0001709169
3,711	The Expressivity of XPath with Transitive Closure*	2006	PODS	7.1778094e-05
4,504	The Complexity of Query Containment in Expressive Fragments of XPath 2.0	2007	PODS	6.6592957e-05
5,457	Destabilizers and Independence of XML Updates	2010	VLDB	6.2131072e-05
8,440	On XPath with Transitive Axes and Data Tests	2013	PODS	5.4248063e-05

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5	4,537	On Testing Satisfiability of Tree Pattern Queries	2004	VLDB
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