A Review of integrity constraint maintenance and view updating techniques

Two interrelated problems may arise when updating a database. On one hand, when an update is applied to the database, integrity constraints may become violated. In such case, the integrity constraint maintenance approach tries to obtain additional updates to keep integrity constraints satisfied. On the other hand, when updates of derived or view facts are requested, a view updating mechanism must be applied to translate the update request into correct updates of the underlying base facts. This survey reviews the research performed on integrity constraint maintenance and view updating. It is proposed a general framework to classify and to compare methods that tackle integrity constraint maintenance and/or view updating. Then, we analyze some of these methods in more detail to identify their actual contribution and the main limitations they may present.Postprint (published version

On the practical applicability of current techniques for reasoning on the structural schema

There has been plenty of promising results for providing automated reasoning on the structural part of the conceptual schema and several prototype tools have been developed with this purpose. However, most of these results have remained at the academical level and the industry is not aware of them or it does not consider them relevant enough since it is not using them in software development. With the aim of reducing the gap between academy and industry, the discussion of the participants in this group was aimed at providing an answer to the following questions: 1. What do we need to convince the industry that this technology is useful? 2. Can we come up with a common vocabulary for the various research disciplines that work on this topic? 3. Can we come up with a research agenda of the problems we have to solve?Postprint (published version

Structuring the process of integrity maintenance (extended version)

Two different approaches have been traditionally considered for dealing with the process of integrity constraints enforcement: integrity checking and integrity maintenance. However, while previous research in the first approach has mainly addressed efficiency issues, research in the second approach has been mainly concentrated in being able to generate all possible repairs that falsify an integrity constraint violation. In this paper we address efficiency issues during the process of integrity maintenance. In this sense, we propose a technique which improves efficiency of existing methods by defining the order in which maintenance of integrity constraints should be performed. Moreover, we use also this technique for being able to handle in an integrated way the integrity constraintsPostprint (published version

IoT semantic data Integration through ontologies

In this position statement we advocate how the use of ontologies may provide a proper solution for IoT semantic data integration. With this, we will improve IoT interoperability and will facilitate the development of software applications that allow providing management and monitoring of different IoT installations in a generic and homogeneous way.This work is partially funded by: Industrial Doctorates DI-2019 from Generalitat de Catalunya, project TIN2017-87610- R from MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, FEDER “Una manera de hacer Europa”, and project 2017-SGR-1749 from Generalitat de Catalunya. Also with the support of inLab FIB at UPC and Worldsensing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Simplification of UML/OCL schemas for efficient reasoning

Ensuring the correctness of a conceptual schema is an essential task in order to avoid the propagation of errors during software development. The kind of reasoning required to perform such task is known to be exponential for UML class diagrams alone and even harder when considering OCL constraints. Motivated by this issue, we propose an innovative method aimed at removing constraints and other UML elements of the schema to obtain a simplified one that preserve the same reasoning outcomes. In this way, we can reason about the correctness of the initial artifact by reasoning on a simplified version of it. Thus, the efficiency of the reasoning process is significantly improved. In addition, since our method is independent from the reasoning engine used, any reasoning method may benefit from it.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Transformation Techniques for OCL Constraints

Constraints play a key role in the definition of conceptual schemas. In the UML, constraints are usually specified by means of invariants written in the OCL. However, due to the high expressiveness of the OCL, the designer has different syntactic alternatives to express each constraint. The techniques presented in this paper assist the designer during the definition of the constraints by means of generating equivalent alternatives for the initially defined ones. Moreover, in the context of the MDA, transformations between these different alternatives are required as part of the PIM-to-PIM, PIM-to-PSM or PIM-to-code transformations of the original conceptual schema

The Constructive method for query containment checking (extended version)

We present a new method that checks Query Containment for queries with negated derived atoms and/or integrity constraints. Existing methods for Query Containment checking that deal with these cases do not check actually containment but another related property called uniform containment, which is a sufficient but not necessary condition for containment. Our method can be seen as an extension of the canonical databases approach beyond the class of conjunctive queries.Postprint (published version

A common framework for classifying and specifying deductive database updating problems

Several problems may arise when updating a deductive database. Up to now, the general approach of the research related to deductive database updating problems has been to provide specific methods for solving particular problems. However, ali these methods are explicitly or implicitly based on a set of rules that define the changes that occur in a transition from an old state of a database to a new, updated state. Therefore, these rules provide the basis of a framework for classifying and specifying these problems. In this paper we propose to use the event rules [Oli91], which explicitly define the insertions and deletions induced by an update, for such a basis. We also define two interpretations of these rules which provide a common framework for classifying and specifying deductive database updating problems such as view updating, materialized view maintenance, integrity constraints checking, integrity constraints maintenance, repairing inconsistent databases, integrity constraints satisfiability or condition monitoring. Moreover, these interpretations allow us to identify and to specify sorne problems that have received little attention up to now like enforcing or preventing condition activation. By considering only a uniqu~ set of rules for specifying all these problems, we want to show that it is possible to provide general methods able to deal with all these problems as a whole

Kopernik : modeling business processes for digital customers

This paper presents the Kopernik methodology for modeling business processes for digital customers. These processes require a high degree of flexibility in the execution of their tasks or actions. We achieve this by using the artifact-centric approach to process modeling and the use of condition-action rules. The processes modeled following Kopernik can then be implemented in an existing commercial tool, Balandra.Preprin

TINTIN : comprobación incremental de aserciones SQL

Ninguno de los SGBD más populares del momento implementa aserciones SQL, obligando así a implementar manualmente su comprobación. Por ello, presentamos TINTIN: una aplicación que genera automáticamente el código SQL para comprobar aserciones. Dicho código captura las tuplas insertadas/borradas en una transacción, comprueba que ninguna de ellas viole ninguna aserción mediante consultas SQL, y materializa los cambios en caso que sean satisfechas. La eficiencia del código se basa en la comprobación incremental de las aserciones.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version