ProbSem: A Probabilistic Semistructured Database Model

Recent interest in semistructured data has led to a proliferation of XML-based standards which encompass applications ranging from multimedia applications and sensor data processing applications to financial applications and myriads of other more traditional applications. When semistructured paradigms are used to store sensor data and multimedia (e.g. image) data, we need to be able to handle uncertainty as sensor readings and image processing methods often yield uncertain results. In this paper, we propose the concept of probabilistic semistructured (PS) databases. We propose a global notion of consistency as well as a local one and show that the two coincide.