Re: Final CFP: XML Database Symposium (XSym03) _at_ VLDB 2003
From: Jan Hidders <jan.hidders_at_pandora.be>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 20:04:08 GMT
Message-ID: <YkO3b.7632$Oj7.426112_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be>
>> That alone would certainly not have been enough. If I would have to
>> summarize their major achievement then it is that they managed to
>> characterize the classical normal forms in an information-theoretic way
>> and
>> they managed to generalize this for the XML data model, which is
>> important because the notion of "update anomaly" is less clear there, and
>> justified that way a normal they had introduced earlier. This has (1)
>> deepened our insight into the classical normal forms for the nested and
>> flat relational model and (2) opened the way for more research on normal
>> forms for more complex data models such as the XML data model.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 20:04:08 GMT
Message-ID: <YkO3b.7632$Oj7.426112_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be>
Mikito Harakiri wrote:
> "Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_pandora.be> wrote in message > news:n2x3b.6238$LD6.306225_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
>> That alone would certainly not have been enough. If I would have to
>> summarize their major achievement then it is that they managed to
>> characterize the classical normal forms in an information-theoretic way
>> and
>> they managed to generalize this for the XML data model, which is
>> important because the notion of "update anomaly" is less clear there, and
>> justified that way a normal they had introduced earlier. This has (1)
>> deepened our insight into the classical normal forms for the nested and
>> flat relational model and (2) opened the way for more research on normal
>> forms for more complex data models such as the XML data model.
> > I thought that Dalkilic&Robertson should be credited for #1 (for "flat" > relations, at least).
A little, but Arenas and Libkin managed to lift the concepts to schema level (Dalkilic and Robertson stay at the instance level) which is certainly not trivial (as they show the "first guess" doesn't work) and essential to get their results.
Anyway, let's also not forget that the Dalkilic and Robertson paper had to compete with the likes of Christos Papadimitriou whom you probably know as the author of the classic work on computational complexity. That's tough competition. :-)
- Jan Hidders