Report Number: CS-TR-96-1576
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: Query Reformulation under Incomplete Mappings
Author: Huyn, Nam
Date: December 1996
Abstract: This paper focuses on some of the important new translatability issues that arise in the problem of interoperation between two database schemas when mappings between these schemas are inherently more complex than traditional views or pure Datalog programs can capture. In many cases, sources cannot be redesigned, and mappings among them exhibit some form of incompleteness under which the question of whether a query can be translated across different schemas is not immediately obvious. The notion of query we consider here is the traditional one, in which the answers to a query are required to be definite: answers cannot be disjunctive or conditional and must refer only to domain constants. In this paper, mappings are modeled by Horn programs that allow existential variables, and queries are modeled by pure Datalog programs. We then consider the problem of eliminating functional terms from the answers to a Horn query where function symbols are allowed. We identify a class of Horn queries called "term-bounded" that are equivalent to pure Datalog queries. We present an algorithm that rewrites a term-bounded query into an "equivalent" pure Datalog query. Equivalence is defined here as yielding the same function-free answer.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/96/1576/CS-TR-96-1576.pdf