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The closely related research areas management of semistructured data and languages for querying the Web have recently attracted a lot of interest. We argue that languages supporting deduction and object-orientation (dood languages) are particularly suited in this context: Object-orientation provides a flexible common data model for combining information from heterogeneous sources and for handling partial information. Techniques for navigating in object-oriented databases can be applied to semistructured databases as well, since the latter may be viewed as (very simple) instances of the former. Deductive rules provide a powerful framework for expressing complex queries in a high-level, declarative programming style. We elaborate on the management of semistructured data and show how reachability queries involving general path expressions and the extraction of data paths in the presence of cyclic data …