Abstract
This paper describes a multirelation semantics for a fragment of the Extended Entity-Relationship schemata formalism based on the bicategorical definition of multirelations. The approach we follow is elementary—we try to introduce as few notions as possible. We claim that bicategorical algebra handles gracefully multirelations and their operations, and that multirelations are essential in a number of applications; moreover, the bicategorical composition of multirelations turns out to correspond to natural joins. Prom the formal semantics we derive an algorithm that can establish statically the possibility of building parallel ownership paths of weak entities. The ideas described in this paper have been implemented in a free tool, ERW, which lets users edit sets and multirelations instantiating an EER schema via a sophisticated web interface.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
G. Berry. Stable models of typed λ-calculi. In G. Ausiello and C. Böhm, editors, Proceedings of the 5th Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, volume 62 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 72–89, Udine, Italy, 1978. Springer-Verlag.
Claude Berge. Graphs. North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1985.
Wayne D. Blizard. Multiset theory. Notre Dame J. Formal Logic, 30(1):36–66, 1989.
Mira Balaban and Peretz Shoval. Resolving the “weak status” of weak entity types in entity-relationship schemas. In Proc. of 18th Int’l Conference on Conceptual Modeling ER’99, number 1728 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 369–383, 1999.
Stefano Ceri, Piero Praternali, and Aldo Bongio. Web Modeling Language (WebML): a modeling language for designing web sites. In Proc. Ninth World Wide Web Conference, 2000.
Peter Pin-Shan Chen. The entity-relationship model: Toward a unified view of data. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, l(l):9–36, 1976.
Ramez Elmasri and Shami Navathe. Fundamentals of Database Systems. Benjamins/Cummings, 1994.
Saunders Mac Lane. Categories for the Working Mathematician. Springer-Verlag, 1971.
G. P. Monro. The concept of multiset. Z. Math. Logik Grundlag. Math., 33(2):171–178, 1987.
Ross Howard Street, Aurelio Carboni, and Stefano Kasangian. Bicategories of spans and relations. J. Pure Appl. Algebra, 33:259–267, 1984.
B. Thalheim. Entity-Relationship Modeling. Springer-Verlag, 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vigna, S. (2002). Multirelational Semantics for Extended Entity-Relationship Schemata With Applications. In: Spaccapietra, S., March, S.T., Kambayashi, Y. (eds) Conceptual Modeling — ER 2002. ER 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2503. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45816-6_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45816-6_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44277-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45816-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive