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On the possibility of path expressions containing backward navigations in object-oriented databases

✍ Scribed by Nobutaka Suzuki; Minoru Ito; Jun Okui


Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
1999
Tongue
English
Weight
723 KB
Volume
30
Category
Article
ISSN
0882-1666

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✦ Synopsis


A path expression in object-oriented databases is an accepted means of navigating over database objects. A backward navigation in a path expression is an operation to find the objects that have a given target object as a given property value. A path expression pd is called possible with respect to a class C if there is a database that contains a path satisfying the following conditions:

  1. The path starts from an object in C.

  2. The sequence of the properties on the path coincides with pd.

In this paper, we first present a sound and complete axiomatization for computing a path expression that is possible with respect to a class. Then we present a polynomial-time algorithm that decides whether a path expression is possible with respect to a class.