Leonid Libkin

Filip Murlak

Marcelo Arenas

Pablo Barceló

Provides a summary of the key developments of a decade of research into the area of data exchange.

Foundations of Data Exchange

Pablo Barcelo

Data exchange is the problem of finding an instance of a target schema, given an instance of a source schema and a specification of the relationship between the source and the target. Such a target instance should correctly represent information from the source instance under the constraints imposed by the target schema, and it should allow one to evaluate queries on the target instance in a way that is semantically consistent with the source data. Data exchange is an old problem that re-emerged as an active research topic recently, due to the increased need for exchange of data in various formats, often in e-business applications. In this lecture, we give an overview of the basic concepts of data exchange in both relational and XML contexts. We give examples of data exchange problems, and we introduce the main tasks that need to addressed. We then discuss relational data exchange, concentrating on issues such as relational schema mappings, materializing target instances (including canonical solutions and cores), query answering, and query rewriting. After that, we discuss metadata management, i.e., handling schema mappings themselves. We pay particular attention to operations on schema mappings, such as composition and inverse. Finally, we describe both data exchange and metadata management in the context of XML. We use mappings based on transforming tree patterns, and we show that they lead to a host of new problems that did not arise in the relational case, but they need to be addressed for XML. These include consistency issues for mappings and schemas, as well as imposing tighter restrictions on mappings and queries to achieve tractable query answering in data exchange. Table of Contents: Overview / Relational Mappings and Data Exchange / Metadata Management / XML Mappings and Data Exchange

Relational and XML Data Exchange

Erich Grädel

Scott Weinstein

Moshe Y. Vardi

Joel Spencer

Phokion G. Kolaitis

Maarten Marx

Yde Venema

Finite model theory,as understoodhere, is an areaof mathematicallogic that has developed in close connection with applications to computer science, in particular the theory of computational complexity and database theory. One of the fundamental insights of mathematical logic is that our understanding of mathematical phenomena is enriched by elevating the languages we use to describe mathematical structures to objects of explicit study. If mathematics is the science of patterns, then the media through which we discern patterns, as well as the structures in which we discern them, command our attention. It isthis aspect oflogicwhichis mostprominentin model theory,“thebranchof mathematical logic which deals with the relation between a formal language and its interpretations”. No wonder, then, that mathematical logic, and ?nite model theory in particular, should ?nd manifold applications in computer science: from specifying programs to querying databases, computer science is rife with phenomena whose understanding requires close attention to the interaction between language and structure. This volume gives a broadoverviewof some central themes of ?nite model theory: expressive power, descriptive complexity, and zero–one laws, together with selected applications to database theory and arti?cial intelligence, es- cially constraint databases and constraint satisfaction problems. The ?nal chapter provides a concise modern introduction to modal logic,which emp- sizes the continuity in spirit and technique with ?nite model theory.

Finite Model Theory and Its Applications

Emphasizes the computer science aspects of the subject. Details applications in databases, complexity theory, and formal languages, as well as other branches of computer science.

Elements of Finite Model Theory

Wenfei Fan

Limsoon Wong

Val Tannen

Wang-Chiew Tan

Michael Fourman

This Festschrift volume, published in honour of Peter Buneman, contains contributions written by some of his colleagues, former students, and friends. In celebration of his distinguished career a colloquium was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, 27-29 October, 2013. The articles presented herein belong to some of the many areas of Peter's research interests.

Essays dedicated to Peter Buneman

In Search of Elegance in the Theory and Practice of Computation

Gabriel Kuper

This book is the first comprehensive survey of the field of constraint databases. Constraint databases are a fairly new and active area of database research. The key idea is that constraints, such as linear or polynomial equations, are used to represent large, or even infinite, sets in a compact way. The ability to deal with infinite sets makes constraint databases particularly promising as a technology for integrating spatial and temporal data with standard re lational databases. Constraint databases bring techniques from a variety of fields, such as logic and model theory, algebraic and computational geometry, as well as symbolic computation, to the design and analysis of data models and query languages. The book is a collaborative effort involving many authors who have con tributed chapters on their fields of expertise. Despite this, the book is designed to be read as a whole, as opposed to a collection of individual surveys. In par ticular, the terminology and the style of presentation have been standardized, and there are multiple cross-references between the chapters. The idea of constraint databases goes back to the late Paris Kanellakis.

Constraint Databases

Leonid Libkin

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