With the social context of collaborative networks becoming increasingly important, research has broadened the traditional concept of competitiveness to include and emphasize ‘soft’ elements, like social capital. The social capital concept can be attained in two different contexts: intra and inter-groups. The objective of this study is to identify inter-organizational social capital elements and...

EÆcient support for set-valued attributes is likely to grow in importance as object-relational database systems, which either support set-valued attributes or propose to do so soon, begin to replace their purely relational predecessors. One of the most interesting and challenging operations on set-valued attributes is the set containment join, because it provides a concise and elegant way to ex...

XML is widely used for data exchange between relational databases. Generic exchange tools are based on mappings between the elements of both schemas. Despite the benefits of using generic tools, the manual definition of the mappings can become a time consuming and error-prone task. Given this scenario we propose algorithms for the automatic matching of XML schemas(DTDs) and relational schemas. ...

The articles [25], [20], [8], [9], [1], [23], [18], [24], [19], [26], [22], [6], [3], [7], [14], [4], [17], [15], [16], [2], [11], [12], [13], [21], and [5] provide the terminology and notation for this paper. The following two propositions are true: (1) For every set x and for every non empty set D holds x∩ ⋃ D = ⋃ {x∩d : d ranges over elements of D}. (2) Let R be a non empty reflexive transit...

Preferences can be used for information filtering and extraction to deliver the most relevant data to the user. Therefore the efficient integration of querying with preferences into standard database technology is an important issue. The paper resumes a logical framework for formulating preferences and their embedding into relational algebra through a single preference operator parameterized by...

Analogy is an inductive mechanism based on structured comparisons of mental representations. It is an important special case of role-based relational reasoning, in which inferences are generated on the basis of patterns of relational roles. Analogical reasoning is a complex process involving retrieval of structured knowledge from long-term memory, representing and manipulating role-filler bindi...

Abstract The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is being used as the de-facto standard in the software industry. With the adoption of UML 2.0, the new enhancements allow this version to describe many of the elements found in today’s software technology as well as Model Driven Architecture and Service-Oriented Architecture. Although OMG has released several UML Profiles to tailor the language to sp...

In this paper we develop a formalization of semantic relations that facilitates efficient implementations of relations in lexical databases or knowledge representation systems using bases. The formalization of relations is based on a modeling of hierarchical relations in Formal Concept Analysis. Further, relations are analysed according to Relational Concept Analysis which allows a representati...

We introduce relational grams (r-grams). They upgrade n-grams for modeling relational sequences of atoms. As n-grams, r-grams are based on smoothed n-th order Markov chains. Smoothed distributions can be obtained by decreasing the order of the Markov chain as well as by relational generalization of the r-gram. To avoid sampling object identifiers in sequences, r-grams are generative models at t...

There is an increasing use of object oriented methods (e.g. [Ru91], [UML97]) for the design of database applications and databases themselves. Like the Entity–Relationship model and its variants, structural models of these methods provide rich modelling concepts for specifying object schemas. Some kinds of integrity constraints, e.g. referential integrity constraints or cardinality constraints ...