XML Navigation and Transformation by Tree-Walking Automata and Transducers with Visible and Invisible Pebbles

Abstract: The pebble tree automaton and the pebble tree transducer are enhanced by additionally allowing an unbounded number of "invisible" pebbles (as opposed to the usual "visible" ones). The resulting pebble tree automata recognize the regular tree languages (i.e., can validate all generalized DTD's) and hence can find all matches of MSO definable patterns. Moreover, when viewed as a navigational device, they lead to an XPath-like formalism that has a path expression for every MSO definable binary pattern. The resulting pebble tree transducers can apply arbitrary MSO definable tests to (the observable part of) their configurations, they (still) have a decidable typechecking problem, and they can model the recursion mechanism of XSLT. The time complexity of the typechecking problem for conjunctive queries that use MSO definable patterns can often be reduced through the use of invisible pebbles.