arXiv subjects

Mouhamadou Lamine Ba

Publications and source records attributed to Mouhamadou Lamine Ba.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2019

Computing Possible and Certain Answers over Order-Incomplete Data

This paper studies the complexity of query evaluation for databases whose relations are partially ordered; the problem commonly arises when combining or transforming ordered data from multiple sources. We focus on queries in a useful fragment of SQL, namely positive relational algebra with aggregates, whose bag semantics we extend to the partially ordered setting. Our semantics leads to the study of two main computational problems: the possibility and certainty of query answers. We show that these problems are respectively NP-complete and coNP-complete, but identify tractable cases depending on the query operators or input partial orders. We further introduce a duplicate elimination operator and study its effect on the complexity results.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2018

Possible and Certain Answers for Queries over Order-Incomplete Data

To combine and query ordered data from multiple sources, one needs to handle uncertainty about the possible orderings. Examples of such "order-incomplete" data include integrated event sequences such as log entries, lists of properties (e.g., hotels and restaurants) ranked by an unknown function reflecting relevance or customer ratings, and documents edited concurrently with an uncertain order on edits. This paper introduces a query language for order-incomplete data, based on the positive relational algebra with order-aware accumulation. We use partial orders to represent order-incomplete data, and study possible and certain answers for queries in this context. We show that these problems are respectively NP-complete and coNP-complete, but identify many tractable cases depending on the query operators or input partial orders.

cs.DB↗