A Navigation over XML Documents through Linear Algebra Tools

This paper presents an algebraic approach, meant to provide an access to XML (extensible markup language) components in the XML hierarchical trees. An adequate theoretical mechanism is critical for the creation of query languages that handle XML documents and is extremely important for the development and standardization of XML parsing process. The authors of this article propose an algebraic formalism for navigation over XML source text, based on the linear algebra theory. In the paper are presented the advantages of this nontraditional approach. The idea is compared to existing higher-order logic formalisms, where the queries are realized by the widely used query languages. A main goal of this article is to provide several modern linear algebra tools for work on the XML document through a direct access to the nodes of XML tree. The authors deeply feel that this direction of research is crucial to advance query languages design, development and their future embedding into practice.