Consider the construction of a publication node, which has a single book node as source context. The context-propagator of the title child location should not select all title nodes found in the source document, but a particular title – the one which is child of the particular book providing the source context of the publication. The requirement captures a semantic relationship between the publication and title nodes under construction. If target node P and target node C have a certain semantic relationship R (here: C gives the title of P), then the source context of P and the source context of C should have the same semantic relationship R (the source context of C should give the title of the source context of P). Mapping alignments to navigations (thus: SAAT to SNAT) means selecting those instances of an alignment which have a particular semantic relationship with the source context of the parent instance. The semantic relationship is implicit - implied by a structural relationship, the parent-child relationship defined as part of the target document model.

As the semantic relationship guiding navigation is implicit, implied by a structural relationship between target nodes (parent-child), it must also be derived from a structural relationship between sources nodes. So we have arrived at the general question: how is the semantic relationship pertaining to a particular parent-child pair in the target document model translated into a structural relationship connecting source nodes, more precisely: leading from the source context of the parent node to a subset of the source alignment of the child location?

We start by considering a particular case for which an intuitive solution is easily found. Let P and C denote two target locations, where C represents child nodes of P. (Example: P = publication, C = title). Assume that the alignment of C is a child location of the alignment of P. (Example: alignment of P: book, alignment of C: title.) Then we may expect the parent-child relationship defined by the target document model to have similar semantics as the parent-child relationship between their alignments, as defined by the source document model. (Example: the child gives the title of the parent.) So we set up a first, preliminary rule: “if the alignments of parent and child locations are themselves parent and child locations, then set the context-propagator of the target child location to select all instances of the source child location which are child nodes of the source context of the parent node.” In our example, this rule would yield the desired result: the source context of the target title would be the child node of the source node serving as the source context of the target publication node.

Parent-child relationships are often modified by the insertion of intermediate nodes providing some sort of grouping. Therefore we might generalize our preliminary rule to select all instances of the target child locations’s alignment which are descendant of the target parent node’s souce context. While this will cover many cases, this is a far cry from a general solution, as hierarchical relationships need not be preserved by the transformation. As an example, consider target documents focusing on authors and describing publications as child elements of the node representing an author