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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1548–1553Cite as

Functional Data Model

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Definition

Functional Data Models are a form of Semantic Data Model which appeared early in database history. They use the mathematical formalism of function application to represent and follow associations between data items. Functions are usually applied to variables whose values may be object identifiers or record instances. Thus if P represents an entity instance of type Person, then forename(P) would return a string (e.g., “Peter”). (Note however that different systems may write this in a LISP style as (forename P) or in JAVA style as P.forename). The function town(P) could be used to represent an association by returning the identifier for Peter’s home town. This allows function composition so that name(town(P)) = P.town.name= "Aberdeen".

Using functions gives several obvious advantages. Firstly the syntax is universally understood, and provides a means of expressing schemas, queries and constraints independently of any supplier-dependent language. This is very handy for...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Peter M. D. Gray

Authors
  1. Peter M. D. Gray
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Correspondence to Peter M. D. Gray .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Tore Risch

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Gray, P.M.D. (2018). Functional Data Model. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_173

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