Dynamic constraints for eXtensible Markup Language (XML) update and the validation

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering, La Trobe University, Bundoora.

XML Update is a process to keep the data inside the database as well as the XML document structure in accordance to the latest requirements of user. To ensure that the new updates will not expose the database to any violation, we require validation processes to be conducted upon the update. There are many aspects that must be considered during the validation, including the location of the updated node, the update complexity, the validation type, etc. In the last decade we have witnessed various research works in update validation of XML documents. However, focus of the research only lies on the static constraint validations. This thesis focuses on the discovery of the dynamic constraints as another possible business constraint that should be well maintained during XML Update. Dynamic constraints are particularly different from the existing constraints as the mode of constraints is based on the time state and hard to be modelled or expressed in similar way like the static constraints. We use rule- based schema language to capture the dynamic constraints for XML where the schemas are to be added on top of the existing XML grammar-based schema, e.g. the XML Schema. The contributions of the thesis include (1) the modelling approach to convey the nature of dynamic constraint on XML data; (2) a proper approach to express the constraints into rule- based schema language; and (3) a methodology to preserve the dynamic constraints during XML Update. Our comprehensive evaluations show that our algorithms are safe to be used for the constraints checking at quite effective results.