Re: RM formalism supporting partial information

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:19:53 -0400
Message-ID: <474ae41e$0$5268$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>


Jan Hidders wrote:

> On 26 nov, 04:53, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 

>>Jan Hidders wrote:
>>
>>>On 24 nov, 23:34, Marshall <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>On Nov 23, 10:56 am, Jan Hidders <hidd..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>>Exactly, so in that sense it is actually complete, and you can make
>>>>>that claim precise. The set of tupels in the answer will be exactly
>>>>>the set of tuples that are certain to be in the result of the same
>>>>>query over the omniscient database. By the nature of the problem every
>>>>>query should actually return 2 sets of tuples: the set of certain
>>>>>answers, and the set of possible answers. Your operators should
>>>>>therefore not operator on relations but on pairs of relations.
>>
>>>>It seems to me that anything that we can say about partial
>>>>information can be said with total information. In other words,
>>>>efforts at making the *system* understand partial information
>>>>are merely pushing systemward calculations that could be done
>>>>in a system without any understanding of partial information.
>>
>>>>If so, it seems to me the best we can hope for with such
>>>>an effort is some additional convenience. At which point,
>>>>any justification for a system with built-in support for
>>>>partial information *must* be done in terms comparing
>>>>the convenience of queries, processing, etc. with vs.
>>>>without the new partial-info primitives. I don't recall having
>>>>seen this done however.
>>
>>>>An analogous situation applies with approximate calculations.
>>
>>>>I would be interested to hear anyone agree or disagree.
>>
>>>I largely agree but would add that if done well the support for
>>>incomplete information would help and/or force you to be more explicit
>>>about what your data means (e.g. in making explicit which CWA where
>>>applies) and what the answers to you queries mean (e.g. only the
>>>certain answers or also the possible answers, or something else).
>>
>>It strikes me that 6NF (or at least good designs that do not try to
>>shoehorn relations with heterogeneous relative cardinalities into a
>>single base relvar) plus views provide exactly that sort of explicitness.
> 
> Only for the "value does not apply" interpretation of null values and
> that wasn't really a big problem in the first place.

I fail to see the relevance of null markers. Not using them obviates interpretation. Received on Mon Nov 26 2007 - 16:19:53 CET

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