Summary: Inheritance under Participation
Constraints and Disjointness
Anastasia Analyti 1 , Nicolas Spyratos 3 \Lambda , Panos Constantopoulos 1;2 , Martin Doerr 1
1 Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology­Hellas, Greece
2 Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Greece
3 Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, Universite de Paris­Sud, France
E­mail: fanalyti, panos, marting@ics.forth.gr, spyratos@lri.fr
Abstract
Traditional database systems have been successful in handling large amounts of data but lack
mechanisms for schema derivations and schema verification. In this paper, we propose (i)
structures that carry expressive and useful information on the database schema, (ii) a set of
inference rules for schema derivations, and (iii) a mechanism for discovering contradictory
schema declarations.
To this end, in addition to the usual Isa relation, we define a stronger form of spe­
cialization for properties, that we call restriction isa, or Risa for short. The Risa relation
expresses property value refinement. A distinctive feature of our model is that it supports
the interaction between (explicit or derived) Isa and Risa relations, in different contexts. We
demonstrate that the combination of Isa and Risa provides a powerful conceptual modeling
mechanism.
The Risa relation allows to express participation constraints on properties. Specifically,

Source: Analyti, Anastasia - Institute of Computer Science, Foundation of Research and Technology, Hellas

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences