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: hc3c43f0255bcc6c2
Venue: PODS
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 9.3796466e-05
Overall Rank: 1,917 | 87.12%
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
162	Integration of Heterogeneous Databases Without Common Domains Using Queries Based on Textual Similarity	1998	SIGMOD	0.00027524669
1,254	Semistructured Data	1997	PODS	0.00011331788
2,484	Querying Semantic Web Data with SPARQL	2011	PODS	8.3957732e-05
2,764	Cut and Paste	1997	PODS	8.0402621e-05
4,594	Queries with Incomplete Answers over Semistructured Data	1999	PODS	6.5106109e-05
6,986	Distributed Computation of Web Queries using Automata	2002	PODS	5.6259107e-05
8,762	Complex Queries over Web Repositories	2003	VLDB	5.2821821e-05
9,335	Positive Active XML	2004	PODS	5.1913554e-05
11,739	Equitable Top-k Results for Long Tail Data	2023	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-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
130	A Query Language and Optimization Techniques for Unstructured Data	1996	SIGMOD	0.00030306096
582	From Structured Documents to Novel Query Facilities	1994	SIGMOD	0.00015975125
586	W3QS: A Query System for the World-Wide Web	1995	VLDB	0.00015937529
1,022	Querying and Updating the File	1993	VLDB	0.00012433667
4,951	BigSur: A System For the Management of Earth Science Data	1995	VLDB	6.3392663e-05

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1	12,873	Optimization of Multi-Domain Queries on the Web	2008	VLDB
2	8,307	Formal Semantics and Analysis of Object Queries	2003	SIGMOD
3	4,223	Foundations of Semantic Web Databases	2004	PODS
4	2,882	Expressive and Flexible Access to Web-Extracted Data: A Keyword-based Structured Query Language	2010	SIGMOD
5	3,553	Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Data	2009	CIDR
6	13,052	Database-Inspired Search	2005	VLDB
7	9,223	A Layered Architecture for Querying Dynamic Web Content	1999	SIGMOD
8	8,762	Complex Queries over Web Repositories	2003	VLDB
9	720	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS
10	6,500	Capturing and Querying Multiple Aspects of Semistructured Data	1999	VLDB