Constraint-Based Approach to Semistructured Data

In this paper we consider how constraint-based technology can be used to query semistructured data. As many concerns in semistructured data (e.g., representing and retrieving) are also found in computational linguistics, this last area could provide an interesting angle to attack some of the problems regarding semistructured data. We present a formalism based on feature logics1 for querying semistructured data. The formalism is a hybrid one in the sense that it combines clauses with path constraints. The resulting language has a clear declarative and operational semantics based on the notion of extended active domain.