XML schema mappings

Relational schema mappings have been extensively studied in connection with data integration and exchange problems, but mappings between XML schemas have not received the same amount of attention. Our goal is to develop a theory of expressive XML schema mappings. Such mappings should be able to use various forms of navigation in a document, and specify conditions on data values. We develop a language for XML schema mappings, and concentrate on three types of problems: static analysis of mappings, their complexity, and their composition. We look at static analysis problems related to various flavors of consistency: for example, whether it is possible to map some document of a source schema into a document of the target schema, or whether all documents of a source schema can be mapped. We classify the complexity of these problems. We then move to the complexity of mappings themselves, i.e., recognizing pairs of documents such that one can be mapped into the other, and provide a classification based on sets of features used in mappings. Finally we look at composition of XML schema mappings. We study its complexity and show that it is harder to achieve closure under composition for XML than for relational mappings. Nevertheless, we find a robust class of XML schema mappings that have good complexity properties and are closed under composition.