Abstract. Despite being widely known and accepted in industry, the Z formal specification language has not so far been well supported by automated verification tools, mostly because of the challenges in handling the abstraction of the language. In this paper we discuss a novel approach to building a model-checker for Z, which involves implementing a translation from Z into SAL, the input language for the Symbolic Analysis Laboratory, a toolset which includes a number of model-checkers and a simulator. The Z2SAL translation deals with a number of important issues, including: mapping unbounded, abstract specifications into bounded, finite models amenable to a BDD-based symbolic checker; converting a non-constructive and piecemeal style of functional specification into a deterministic, automaton-based style of specification; and supporting the rich set-based vocabulary of the Z mathematical toolkit. This paper discusses progress made towards implementing as complete and faithful a translation as possible, while highlighting certain assumptions, respecting certain limitations and making use of available optimisations. The translation is illustrated throughout with examples; and a complete working example is presented, together with performance data.

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Abstract. In this paper we discuss our progress towards building a model-checker for Z. The approach we take in our Z2SAL project involves implementing a translation from Z into the SAL input language, upon which the SAL toolset can be applied. The toolset includes a number of model-checkers together with a simulator. In this paper we discuss our progress towards implementing as complete as a translation as possible, the limitations we have reached and the optimizations we have made. We illustrate with a small example.

The growing number of XML documents leads to the need for appropriate XML querying algorithms which are able to utilize the specific characteristics of XML documents. A labelling scheme is fundamental to processing XML queries efficiently. They are used to determine structural relationships between elements corresponding to query nodes in twig pattern queries (TPQs). This article presents a design and implementation of a new indexing technique which exploits the property of prime numbers to identify Parent-Child (P-C) relationships in TPQs during query evaluation. The Child Prime Label (CPL, for short) approach can be efficiently incorporated within the existing labelling schemes. Here, we propose a novel twig matching algorithm based on the well known TwigStack algorithm [3], which applies the CPL approach and focuses on reducing the overhead of storing useless elements and performing unnecessary join operations. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that the new algorithm significantly outperforms the previous approaches.

Abstract:Twig pattern matching is a core operation in XML query processing because it is how all the occurrences of a twig pattern in an XML document are found. In the past decade, many algorithms have been proposed to perform twig pattern matching. They rely on labelling schemes to determine relationships between elements corresponding to query nodes in constant time. In this paper, a new algorithm TwigStackPrime is proposed, which is an improvement to TwigStack (Bruno et al., 2002). To reduce the memory consumption and computation overhead of twig pattern matching algorithms when Parent-Child (P-C) edges are involved, TwigStackPrime efficiently filters out a tremendous number of irrelevant elements by introducing a new labelling scheme, called Child Prime Label (CPL). Extensive performance studies on various real-world and artificial datasets were conducted to demonstrate the significant improvement of CPL over the previous indexing and querying techniques. The experimental results show that the new technique has a superior performance to the previous approaches.