Leonid Libkin - Böcker

The problem of exchanging data between different databases with different schemas is an area of immense importance. Consequently data exchange has been one of the most active research topics in databases over the past decade. Foundational questions related to data exchange largely revolve around three key problems: how to build target solutions; how to answer queries over target solutions; and how to manipulate schema mappings themselves? The last question is also known under the name 'metadata management', since mappings represent metadata, rather than data in the database. In this book the authors summarize the key developments of a decade of research. Part I introduces the problem of data exchange via examples, both relational and XML; Part II deals with exchanging relational data; Part III focuses on exchanging XML data; and Part IV covers metadata management.

Data exchange is the problem of finding an instance of a target schema, given an instance of a source schema and a specification of the relationship between the source and the target. Table of Contents: Overview / Relational Mappings and Data Exchange / Metadata Management / XML Mappings and Data Exchange

This book gives a broad overview of core topics of finite model theory: expressive power, descriptive complexity, and zero-one laws, together with selected applications to database theory and artificial intelligence, especially constraint databases and constraint satisfaction problems. The final chapter provides a concise modern introduction to modal logic, which emphasizes the continuity in spirit and technique with finite model theory. This underlying spirit involves the use of various fragments of, and hierarchies within, first order, second order, fixed point, and infinitary logics to gain insight into phenomena in complexity theory and combinatorics. Students of logic and computer science will find here the tools necessary to embark on research in finite model theory, and all readers will experience the excitement of a vibrant area of application of logic to computer science.

Finite model theory is an area of mathematical logic that grew out of computer science applications. The main sources of motivational examples for finite model theory are found in database theory, computational complexity, and formal languages, although in recent years connections with other areas, such as formal methods and verification, and artificial intelligence, have been discovered. The birth of finite model theory is often identified with Trakhtenbrot's result from 1950 stating that validity over finite models is not recursively enumerable; in other words, completeness fails over finite models. The tech­ nique of the proof, based on encoding Turing machine computations as finite structures, was reused by Fagin almost a quarter century later to prove his cel­ ebrated result that put the equality sign between the class NP and existential second-order logic, thereby providing a machine-independent characterization of an important complexity class. In 1982, Immerman and Vardi showed that over ordered structures, a fixed point extension of first-order logic captures the complexity class PTIME of polynomial time computable propertiE~s. Shortly thereafter, logical characterizations of other important complexity classes were obtained. This line of work is often referred to as descriptive complexity. A different line of finite model theory research is associated with the de­ velopment of relational databases. By the late 1970s, the relational database model had replaced others, and all the basic query languages for it were es­ sentially first-order predicate calculus or its minor extensions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2005, held in Edinburgh, UK in January 2005.The 24 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited articles were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query languages and types, multi-dimensional data processing, algorithmic aspects, privacy and security, logic and databases, query rewriting, and query processing and data streams.

This book presents a coherent suvey on exciting developments in database semantics. The origins of the volume date back to a workshop held in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1995. The nine revised full papers and surveys presented were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. They address more traditional aspects like dealing with integrity constraints and conceptual modeling as well as new areas of databases; object-orientation, incomplete information, database transformations and other issues are investigated by applying formal semantics, e.g. the evolving algebra semantics.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of the field of constraint databases, written by leading researchers. Constraint databases are a fairly new and active area of database research. The key idea is that constraints, such as linear or polynomial equations, are used to represent large, or even infinite, sets in a compact way. The ability to deal with infinite sets makes constraint databases particularly promising as a technology for integrating spatial and temporal data with standard relational databases. Constraint databases bring techniques from a variety of fields, such as logic and model theory, algebraic and computational geometry, as well as symbolic computation, to the design and analysis of data models and query languages.

Finite model theory is an area of mathematical logic that grew out of computer science applications. The birth of finite model theory is often identified with Trakhtenbrot's result from 1950 stating that validity over finite models is not recursively enumerable;

This book is the first comprehensive survey of the field of constraint databases. Constraint databases are a fairly new and active area of database research. The key idea is that constraints, such as linear or polynomial equations, are used to represent large, or even infinite, sets in a compact way. The ability to deal with infinite sets makes constraint databases particularly promising as a technology for integrating spatial and temporal data with standard re­ lational databases. Constraint databases bring techniques from a variety of fields, such as logic and model theory, algebraic and computational geometry, as well as symbolic computation, to the design and analysis of data models and query languages. The book is a collaborative effort involving many authors who have con­ tributed chapters on their fields of expertise. Despite this, the book is designed to be read as a whole, as opposed to a collection of individual surveys. In par­ ticular, the terminology and the style of presentation have been standardized, and there are multiple cross-references between the chapters. The idea of constraint databases goes back to the late Paris Kanellakis.

Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Communication, WoLLIC 2013, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in August 2013.

This Festschrift volume, published in honour of Peter Buneman, contains contributions written by some of his colleagues, former students, and friends. In celebration of his distinguished career a colloquium was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, 27-29 October, 2013. The articles presented herein belong to some of the many areas of Peter's research interests.