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SCOPE OF THE SERIESLogic is applied in an increasingly wide variety of disciplines, from the traditional subjects of philosophy and mathematics to the more recent disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics, leading to new vigor in this ancient subject. Kluwer, through its Applied Logic Series, seeks to provide a home for outstanding books and research monographs in applied logic, and in doing so demonstrates the underlying unity and applicability of logic.

XPath is the W3C-standard node addressing language for XML documents. XPath is still under development and its technical aspects are intensively studied. What is missing at present is a clear characterization of the expressive power of XPath, be it either semantical or with reference to some well established existing (logical) formalism. Core XPath (the logical core of XPath 1.0 defined by Gottlob et al.) cannot express queries with conditional paths as exemplified by "do a child step, while test is true at the resulting node." In a first-order complete extension of Core XPath, such queries are expressible. We add conditional axis relations to Core XPath and show that the resulting language, called conditional XPath, is equally expressive as first-order logic when interpreted on ordered trees. Both the result, the extended XPath language, and the proof are closely related to temporal logic. Specifically, while Core XPath may be viewed as a simple temporal logic, conditional XPath extends this with (counterparts of) the since and until operators.

SCOPE OF THE SERIESLogic is applied in an increasingly wide variety of disciplines, from the traditional subjects of philosophy and mathematics to the more recent disciplines of cognitive science, computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics, leading to new vigor in this ancient subject. Kluwer, through its Applied Logic Series, seeks to provide a home for outstanding books and research monographs in applied logic, and in doing so demonstrates the underlying unity and applicability of logic.

Access control for XML documents is a non-trivial topic, as can be witnessed from the number of approaches presented in the literature. Trying to compare these, we discovered the need for a simple, clear and unambiguous language to state the declarative semantics of an access control policy. All current approaches state the semantics in natural language, which has none of the above properties. This makes it hard to assess whether the proposed algorithms are correct (i.e., really implement the described semantics). It is also hard to assess the proposed policy on its merits, and to compare it to others (for file systems for instance).This paper shows how XPath can be used to specify the semantics of an access control policy for XML documents. Using XPath has great advantages: it is standard technology, widely used and it has clear and easy syntax and semantics. We use the developed framework to give a formal specification of the five most prominent approaches of access control for XML documents from the literature.

Abstract. We present a (sound and complete) tableau calculus for Quantified Hybrid Logic (QHL). QHL is an extension of orthodox quantified modal logic: as well as the usual ✷ and ✸ modalities it contains names for (and variables over) states, operators @s for asserting that a formula holds at a named state, and a binder ↓ that binds a variable to the current state. The first-order component contains equality and rigid and non-rigid designators. As far as we are aware, ours is the first tableau system for QHL. Completeness is established via a variant of the standard translation to first-order logic. More concretely, a valid QHL-sentence is translated into a valid first-order sentence in the correspondence language. As it is valid, there exists a first-order tableau proof for it. This tableau proof is then converted into a QHL tableau proof for the original sentence. In this way we recycle a well-known result (completeness of first-order logic) instead of a well-known proof. The tableau calculus is highly flexible. We only present it for the constant domain semantics, but slight changes render it complete for varying, expanding or contracting domains. Moreover, completeness with respect to specific frame classes can be obtained simply by adding extra rules or axioms (this can be done for every first-order definable class of frames which is closed under and reflects generated subframes).

The guarded fragment (GF) was introduced in [1] as a fragment of first order logic which combines a great expressive power with nice modal behavior. It consists of relational first order formulas whose quantifiers are relativized by atoms in a certain way. While GF has been established as a particularly well-behaved fragment of first order logic in many respects, interpolation fails in restriction to GF, [9]. In this paper we consider the Beth property of first order logic and show that, despite the failure of interpolation, it is retained in restriction to GF. The Beth property for GF is here established on the basis of a limited form of interpolation, which more closely resembles the interpolation property that is usually studied in modal logics. ¿From this we obtain that, more specifically, even every n-variable guarded fragment with up to nary relations has the Beth property.