XML Schema Mappings: Data Exchange and Metadata Management

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 study both data exchange with such mappings and metadata management problems. Specifically, we concentrate on four types of problems: complexity of mappings, query answering, consistency issues, and composition. We first analyze the complexity of mappings, that is, 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. Next, we chart the tractability frontier for the query answering problem. We show that the problem is tractable for expressive schema mappings and simple queries, but not vice versa. Then, we move to static analysis. We study the complexity of the consistency problem, that is, deciding whether it is possible to map some document of a source schema into a document of the target schema. Finally, we look at composition of XML schema mappings. We analyze 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, in addition to being closed under composition, have good complexity properties with respect to the main data management tasks. Due to its good properties, we suggest this class as the class to use in applications of XML schema mappings.