2 research outputs found
Composition with Target Constraints
It is known that the composition of schema mappings, each specified by
source-to-target tgds (st-tgds), can be specified by a second-order tgd (SO
tgd). We consider the question of what happens when target constraints are
allowed. Specifically, we consider the question of specifying the composition
of standard schema mappings (those specified by st-tgds, target egds, and a
weakly acyclic set of target tgds). We show that SO tgds, even with the
assistance of arbitrary source constraints and target constraints, cannot
specify in general the composition of two standard schema mappings. Therefore,
we introduce source-to-target second-order dependencies (st-SO dependencies),
which are similar to SO tgds, but allow equations in the conclusion. We show
that st-SO dependencies (along with target egds and target tgds) are sufficient
to express the composition of every finite sequence of standard schema
mappings, and further, every st-SO dependency specifies such a composition. In
addition to this expressive power, we show that st-SO dependencies enjoy other
desirable properties. In particular, they have a polynomial-time chase that
generates a universal solution. This universal solution can be used to find the
certain answers to unions of conjunctive queries in polynomial time. It is easy
to show that the composition of an arbitrary number of standard schema mappings
is equivalent to the composition of only two standard schema mappings. We show
that surprisingly, the analogous result holds also for schema mappings
specified by just st-tgds (no target constraints). This is proven by showing
that every SO tgd is equivalent to an unnested SO tgd (one where there is no
nesting of function symbols). Similarly, we prove unnesting results for st-SO
dependencies, with the same types of consequences.Comment: This paper is an extended version of: M. Arenas, R. Fagin, and A.
Nash. Composition with Target Constraints. In 13th International Conference
on Database Theory (ICDT), pages 129-142, 201
Answering Non-Monotonic Queries in Relational Data Exchange
Relational data exchange is the problem of translating relational data from a
source schema into a target schema, according to a specification of the
relationship between the source data and the target data. One of the basic
issues is how to answer queries that are posed against target data. While
consensus has been reached on the definitive semantics for monotonic queries,
this issue turned out to be considerably more difficult for non-monotonic
queries. Several semantics for non-monotonic queries have been proposed in the
past few years. This article proposes a new semantics for non-monotonic
queries, called the GCWA*-semantics. It is inspired by semantics from the area
of deductive databases. We show that the GCWA*-semantics coincides with the
standard open world semantics on monotonic queries, and we further explore the
(data) complexity of evaluating non-monotonic queries under the
GCWA*-semantics. In particular, we introduce a class of schema mappings for
which universal queries can be evaluated under the GCWA*-semantics in
polynomial time (data complexity) on the core of the universal solutions.Comment: 55 pages, 3 figure