Aggregate languages for constraint databases
In this piece of work the authors consider the interesting problem of extending constraint query languages with suitable aggregation constructs. Indeed, as stated in the introduction, ``Constraint query languages give a natural analog of relational calculus in the geometric context. Thus the need to extend standard aggregation construct to the geometric framework is really urgent. The main concern of this work is to define a constraint query language closed under aggregation.Indeed, as the authors show in section 2, existing first order constraint query language are not closed under taking of volumes. In their work the authors considers three alternative approaches to this problem: (1) compute approximate volumes; (2) use complex constraint including new functions (log, exp,...); (3) search for languages that compute or approximate the volumes of important class of sets, but may be not closed for iterative application of aggregates. The authors propose a well developed analysis of the three approaches, showing that the approximate volume operator on semi-algebraic sets is computationally infeasible, and analyze solutions based on the idea of restricting the applicability of the volume operator. Overall, this is an interesting piece of work, worth reading.(Review written together with Sergio Flesca, Universitá della Calabria, Italy). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0935.00022].
This page was built for publication: Aggregate languages for constraint databases
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q4508940)
