Section: Research Program

Research Program

Dahu aims at developing mechanisms for high-level specifications of systems built around DBMS, that are easy to understand while also facilitating verification of critical properties. This requires developing tools that are suitable for reasoning about systems that manipulate data. Some tools for specifying and reasoning about data have already been studied independently by the database community and by the verification community, with various motivations. However, this work is still in its infancy and needs to be further developed and unified.

Most current proposals for reasoning about DBMS over XML documents are based on tree automata, taking advantage of the tree structure of XML documents. For this reason, the Dahu team is studying a variety of tree automata. This ranges from restrictions of “classical” tree automata in order to understand their expressive power, to extensions of tree automata in order to understand how to incorporate the manipulation of data.

Moreover, Dahu is also interested in logical frameworks that explicitly refer to data. Such logical frameworks can be used as high level declarative languages for specifying integrity constraints, format change during data exchange, web service functionalities and so on. Moreover, the same logical frameworks can be used to express the critical properties we wish to verify.

In order to achieve its goals, Dahu brings together world-class expertise in both databases and verification.