Abstract:
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Functional Dependencies (FDs) play a key role in many fields
of the relational database model, one of the most widely used database
systems. FDs have also been applied in data analysis, data quality, knowl-
edge discovery and the like, but in a very limited scope, because of their
fixed semantics. To overcome this limitation, many generalizations have
been defined to relax the crisp definition of FDs. FDs and a few of their
generalizations have been characterized with Formal Concept Analysis
which reveals itself to be an interesting unified framework for charac-
terizing dependencies, that is, understanding and computing them in a
formal way. In this paper, we extend this work by taking into account
order-like dependencies. Such dependencies, well defined in the database
field, consider an ordering on the domain of each attribute, and not sim-
ply an equality relation as with standard FDs. |