Using Relationship Roles to Disambiguate Conceptual-Level Queries

QUICK is a powerful database query tool used to simplify database access. It allows users and applications to formulate high-level queries to relational databases without specifying information about the underlying logical-level structure. This high-level query interface provides substantial cost savings to the applications development and maintenance process. Software development time is decreased because programmers need not be familiar with the structure and format of the underlying logical-level databases to formulate queries. Also, as the database structure evolves, the high-level queries remain unchanged. QUICK uses a conceptual knowledge construct called a context to generate corresponding logical-level SQL queries. When the conceptual database schema contains certain classes of cycles, contexts lack the knowledge necessary to automatically generate logical queries from high-level requests. This paper identifies how relationship roles specified in the conceptual schema in conjunction with the new notion of supercontexts can be exploited to generate reasonable queries on cyclic schemas.