Compact ancestry labeling schemes for XML trees

An ancestry labeling scheme labels the nodes of any tree in such a way that ancestry queries between any two nodes can be answered just by looking at their corresponding labels. The common measure to evaluate the quality of an ancestry scheme is by its label size, that is the maximum number of bits stored in a label, taken over all n-node trees. The design of ancestry labeling schemes finds applications in XML search engines. In these contexts, even small improvements in the label size are important. As a result, following the proposal of a simple interval based ancestry scheme with label size 2 log n bits (Kannan et al., STOC 88), a considerable amount of work was devoted to improve the bound on the label size. The current state of the art upper bound is log n + O(√log n) bits (Abiteboul et al., SICOMP 06) which is still far from the known log n + Ω(log log n) lower bound (Alstrup et al., SODA 03). Motivated by the fact that typical XML trees have extremely small depth, this paper parameterizes the quality measure of an ancestry scheme not only by the number of nodes in the given tree but also by its depth. Our main result is the construction of an ancestry scheme that labels n-node trees of depth d with labels of size log n + 2 log d + O(1). In addition to our main result, we prove a result that may be of independent interest concerning the existence of a small universal graph for the family of trees with bounded depth.