A Unified Constraint Model for XML

Integrity constraints are an essential part of modern schema definition languages. They are useful for semantic specification, update consistency control, query optimization, etc. In this paper, we propose UCM, a model of integrity constraints for XML that is both simple and expressive. Because it relies on a single notion of keys and foreign keys, the UCM model is easy to use and makes formal reasoning possible. Because it relies on a powerful type system, the UCM model is expressive, capturing in a single framework the constraints found in relational databases, object-oriented schemas and XML document type definitions. We study the problem of consistency of UCM constraints, the interaction between constraints and subtyping, and algorithms for implementing these constraints.