XPath evaluation using XML schemas rather than XML documents themselves

In September 2003, as I was nearing the end of my M.Sc. studies at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, I finished the thesis that was the culmination of six months’ research. Supervised by Dr Henry S Thompson, the thesis concerned itself with XPath and XML Schema, two cutting-edge Web technologies of the time.

You can download the original PDF and you can read the abstract below.

Abstract

XPath, the XML path language, consists of expressions denoting paths that locate elements or attributes in an XML document tree. As an example, the expression /a//b/c picks out any c attribute of a b element at any depth under an a document root element. But what if the document is constrained by its document type — a DTD or an XML schema — so b elements don’t have c attributes? Or if a elements don’t have b descendents, at any depth? Then evaluation is pointless.

Taking this into consideration, this thesis sets out to evaluate XPath expressions against XML schemas, not against the documents they describe, to determine whether in principle they could be satisfied.

Citation

If you want to cite this thesis in your work you can use this BibTeX entry:

@MastersThesis{riggott2003,
  title    = {{{XPath}} Evaluation Using {{XML}} Schemas Rather than {{XML}} Documents Themselves},
  author   = {Riggott, Matt},
  school   = {University of Edinburgh},
  year     = {2003},
  month    = sep,
  language = {en-gb},
  url      = {https://www.flother.is/thesis/}
}