Unifying and Generalizing Relations in Role-Based Data Modeling and Navigation

Conference paper (2014)

Authors

D.C. Harkes Programming Languages - EEMCS
Eelco Visser Programming Languages - EEMCS
Research Group
Programming Languages (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2014

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Programming Languages

Abstract

Object-oriented programming languages support concise navigation of relations represented by references. However, relations are not first-class citizens and bidirectional navigation is not supported. The relational paradigm provides first-class relations, but with bidirectional navigation through verbose queries. We present a systematic analysis of approaches to modeling and navigating relations. By unifying and generalizing the features of these approaches, we developed the design of a data modeling language that features first-class relations, n-ary relations, native multiplicities, bidirectional relations and concise navigation.