Whilst visiting David Toman at the University of Waterloo during my sabbatical earlier this year, one of the topics we looked into was their experiments on whether their SQLP—SQL with path queries, extended from [1]—would be better than plain SQL in terms of time it takes to understand queries and correctness in writing them. Turned out (in a user evaluation) that it’s faster with SQLP whilst maintaining accuracy. The really interesting aspect in all this from my perspective, however, was the so-called Abstract Relational Model (ARM), or: the modelling side of things rather than making the querying easier, as the latter is made easier with the ARM. In simple terms, the ARM [1] is alike the relational model, but then with identifiers, which makes those path queries doable and mostly more succinct, and one can partition the relations into class-relationship-like models (approaching the look-and-feel of a conceptual model) or lump stuff together into relational-model-like models, as preferred. Interestingly, it turns out that the queries remain exactly the same regardless whether one makes the ARM look more relational-like or ontology-like, which is called “invariance under vertical partitioning” in the paper [2]. Given all these nice things, there’s now also an algorithm to go from the usual relational model to an ARM schema, so that even if one has legacy resources, it’s possible to bump it up to this newer technology with more features and ease of use.
Our paper [2] that describes these details (invariance, RM-to-ARM, the evaluation), entitled “The Utility of the Abstract Relational Model and Attribute Paths in SQL”, is being published as part of the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’18), which will be held in Nancy, France, in about two weeks.
This sort of Conceptual Model(like)-based Data Access (CoMoDA, if you will) may sound a bit like Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). Yes and No. Roughly, yes on the conceptual querying sort of thing (there’s still room for quite some hair splitting there, though); no regarding the conceptual querying sort of thing. The ARM doesn’t pretend to be an ontology, but easily has a reconstruction in a Description Logic language [3] (with n-aries! and identifiers!). SQLP is much more expressive than the union of conjunctive queries one can pose in a typical OBDA setting, however, for it is full SQL + those path queries. So, both the theory and technology are different from the typical OBDA setting. Now, don’t think I’m defecting on the research topics—I still have a whole chapter on OBDA in my textbook—but it’s interesting to learn about and play with alternative approaches toward solutions to (at a high level) the same problem of trying to make querying for information easier and faster.
References
[1] Borgida, A., Toman, D., Weddell, G.E. On referring expressions in information systems derived from conceptual modelling. Proc. of ER’16. Springer LNCS, vol. 9974, 183-197.
[2] Ma, W., Keet, C.M., Olford, W., Toman, D., Weddell, G. The Utility of the Abstract Relational Model and Attribute Paths in SQL. 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW’18). Springer LNAI. (in print). 12-16 Nov. 2018, Nancy, France.
[3] Jacques, J.S., Toman, D., Weddell, G.E. Object-relational queries over CFDInc knowledge bases: OBDA for the SQL-Literate. Proc. of IJCAI’16. 1258-1264 (2016)
Keet blog 