A SNAT document describes an intended transformation precisely, whereas alignment is less precise. Consider, for example, the relationship between publication, isbn and title nodes. The SNAT document guarantees that each source book is mapped to a distinct publication and that the isbn and title children of a publication element refer to the same book source element. This expectation is very intuitive, and therefore it may go unnoticed that the alignments shown above do not make these commitments: the alignments would not be contradicted by a transformation where a publication contains a title taken from one book and an isbn taken from another book, or (if we ignore cardinality constraints) a publication containing all title and all isbn values found in any book.

The core of this problem lies in semantic relationships pertaining to structural relationships in general, and parent-child relationships in particular. The node name title, for instance, indicates that node contents represent a title, but it does not hint at a semantic relationship between nodes, which constrains the child title to represent a property of the parent publication. (Were the element name hasTitle, this would be slightly different.) The SNAT model of a transformation preserves the intended semantic relationships implicitly: via navigation. Navigation to a particular title as well as to a particular isbn, executed while constructing an individual target publication, ensures that the target document expresses the intended semantics.

The question arises if we cannot set up rules how to map alignments to navigation steps. Table 6, “A comparison between navigation steps and alignments.” clearly suggests such a possibility. It should be remembered that the SNAT model is essentially a decomposition of transformation into navigation steps, or, the other way around, an integration of navigation steps into a complete picture of a transformation. If we can infer navigation steps from pairs of alignments (the alignments of parent and child locations), we have come very close to solving the problem of mapping alignments to a complete picture of the transformation. The task of generating transformation code from alignments can be redefined as the task of mapping a SAAT tree to a SNAT tree.