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International Conference on Conceptual Modeling

ER 2010: Conceptual Modeling – ER 2010 pp 347–361Cite as

Query Answering under Expressive Entity-Relationship Schemata

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 6412)

Abstract

We address the problem of answering conjunctive queries under constraints representing schemata expressed in an extended version of the Entity- Relationship model. This extended model, called ER +  model, comprises is-a constraints among entities and relationships, plus functional and mandatory participation constraints. In particular, it allows arbitrary permutations of the roles in is-a among relationships. A key notion that ensures high tractability in ER +  schemata is separability, i.e., the absence of interaction between the functional participation constraints and the other constructs of ER + .We provide a precise syntactic characterization of separable ER +  schemata, called ER± schemata, by means of a necessary and sufficient condition. We present a complete complexity analysis of the conjunctive query answering problem under ER± schemata. We show that the addition of so-called negative constraints does not increase the complexity of query answering. With such constraints, our model properly generalizes the most widely-adopted tractable ontology languages.

Keywords

  • Data Complexity
  • Description Logic
  • Relational Schema
  • Conjunctive Query
  • Query Answer

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_25
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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford, UK

    Georg Gottlob & Andreas Pieris

  2. Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford, UK

    Andrea Calì & Georg Gottlob

  3. Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, UK

    Andrea Calì

Authors
  1. Andrea Calì
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  2. Georg Gottlob
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  3. Andreas Pieris
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NF, Canada

    Jeffrey Parsons

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ookayama 2-12-1, Meguro-ku, 152-8552, Tokyo, Japan

    Motoshi Saeki

  3. Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 84105, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Peretz Shoval

  4. Department of Management Information Systems, University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business, 153-2053 Main Mall, V6T 1Z2, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Carson Woo & Yair Wand & 

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Calì, A., Gottlob, G., Pieris, A. (2010). Query Answering under Expressive Entity-Relationship Schemata. In: Parsons, J., Saeki, M., Shoval, P., Woo, C., Wand, Y. (eds) Conceptual Modeling – ER 2010. ER 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6412. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_25

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