XPathLog: A Declarative, Native XML Data Manipulation Language

XPathLog is a logic-based language for manipulating and integrating XML data. It extends the XPath query language with Prolog-style variables. Due to the close relationship with XPath, the semantics of rules is easy to grasp. In contrast to other approaches, the XPath syntax and semantics is also used for a declarative specification how the database should be updated: when used in rule heads, XPath filters are interpreted as specifications of elements and properties which should be added to the database. The formal semantics is defined wrt. a graph Herbrand structure which covers the XML tree data model. XPathLog has been implemented in LOPiX.