On the Definition and Axiomatization of Inclusion Dependencies for XML

The wide acceptance of XML as the standard model for data integration demands highly expressive integrity constraints for XML that preserve the semantics of source data during transformation. This paper studies an XML inclusion dependency (XIND), an integrity constraint that precisely captures the semantics of the classical inclusion dependency when relational data is mapped to XML. A set of sound and complete inference rules for determining finite logical implication of XINDs is given, and it is shown that every set of XINDs can be satisfied by at least one non-empty set of XML documents.