In the recent years, an huge amount of information from various application domains are stored, exchanged, and presented using XML. In this context, the ability to safely, efficiently and uniformly query XML data on different platforms such as mobile devices on a variety of data sources becomes increasingly important. XQuery is W3C standard for querying XML data. It is increasingly popular and one of the challenges in web software development today is to help achieving a good level of quality in terms of programming frameworks, code size and runtime performance. In particular, with the recent advances in document formats such as the advent of HTML5, SVG and other UI oriented formats together with the increasing interaction between browsers and remote services, a general purpose, uniform and reliable alternative to JavaScript can be played with languages such as XQuery.
Supervisor: Cécile Roisin
Co-supervisor: Pierre Genevès
Place: INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes, Montbonnot
Contact: Pierre Geneves <pierre.geneves@inria.fr>
The topic of this PhD thesis consists in designing and implementing a programming environment for XQuery that can offer the following features :
Based on these features, other applications can be built to offer security features for data manipulations such as path-based access control policies.
On the theoretical side, the work proposed consists in extending an existing logical framework for XML reasoning to the modeling and reasoning on node sequences. The foundations are based on newly developed formal programming language verification techniques [1,2], which are now mature enough to be introduced in the context of software development.
The WAM project seeks to establish logical foundations and automated reasoning techniques with applications concerning, but not limited to, static analysis of programs manipulating XML documents, pointer and heap analysis, program verification. Information about previous relevant research is available online.
Applicants should have interests in programming languages, type theory, and/or mathematical logic, with a concern in the intersection of theory and practice. Expertise in the following areas are particularly welcomed:
[1] Efficient Static Analysis of XML Paths and Types. Pierre Geneves, Nabil Layaida and Alan Schmitt. PLDI'07.
[2] Impact of XML Schema Evolution. Pierre Geneves, Nabil Layaida and Vincent Quint. TOIT'11.
[3] XQuery in the browser. Ghislain Fourny, Donald Kossmann, Tim Kraska, Markus Pilman, and Daniela Florescu. SIGMOD '08.
XQuery, static analysis, type system, security, mobile computing
4 March 2011