Abstract
Part-whole relations are ubiquitous in our world, yet they do not get “first-class” treatment in the data managements systems most commonly used today. One aspect of part-whole relations that is particularly important is that of attribute transitivity. Some attributes of a whole are also attributes of its parts, and vice versa. We propose an extension to a generic entity-centric data model to support part-whole relations and attribute transitivity and provide more meaningful results to certain types of queries as a result. We describe how this model can be implemented using an RDF repository and three approaches to infer the implicit information necessary for query answering that adheres to the semantics of the model. The first approach is a naive implementation and the other two use indexing to improve performance. We evaluate several aspects of our implementations in a series of experimental results that show that the two approaches that use indexing are far superior to the naive approach and exhibit some advantages and disadvantages when compared to each other.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
References
Artale, A., Franconi, E., Guarino, N., Pazzi, L.: Part-whole relations in object-centered systems: an overview. Data Knowl. Eng. 20(3), 347–383 (1996)
Bertino, E., Guerrini, G.: Extending the ODMG object model with composite objects. SIGPLAN Not. 33(10), 259–270 (1998)
Dong, X., Halevy, A.: Indexing dataspaces. In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 43–54. ACM, Beijing (2007)
Gerstl, P., Pribbenow, S.: Midwinters, end games, and body parts: a classification of part-whole relations. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 43(5–6), 865–889 (1995)
Gerstl, P., Pribbenow, S.: A conceptual theory of part-whole relations and its applications. Data Knowl. Eng. 20(3), 305–322 (1996)
Halper, M., Geller, J., Perl, Y.: An OODB part-whole model: semantics, notation and implementation. Data Knowl. Eng. 27(1), 59–95 (1998)
Winston, M., Chaffin, R., Herrmann, D.: A taxonomy of Part-Whole relations. Cogn. Sci. 11(4), 417–444 (1987)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kozikowski, P., Ioannou, E., Velegrakis, Y., Guerra, F. (2015). Support of Part-Whole Relations in Query Answering. In: Cardoso, J., Guerra, F., Houben, GJ., Pinto, A.M., Velegrakis, Y. (eds) Semantic Keyword-Based Search on Structured Data Sources. IKC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27932-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27932-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27931-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27932-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)