Improving Semantic Specification in a Relational Database

Summary: Introduces renaming rules to formalize attribute relationships and generalization in the relational model. Axiomatizes the framework, derives select/union semantics from natural joins via Smith's subcategory functional dependencies, and presents a general normal-form decomposition algorithm. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2173
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1979
Pagerank: 8.2127746e-05
Overall Rank: 2,712 | 81.40%
DOI: 10.1145/582095.582124

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Edward Sciore (Princeton University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{sciore_sigmod79,
        title = {{Improving Semantic Specification in a Relational Database}},
        author = {Sciore, Edward},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '79},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/582095.582124},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/582095.582124},
        year = {1979}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
676	On An Algebra For Historical Relational Databases. Two Views	1985	SIGMOD	0.00015072586
1,577	Compatible Attributes In A Universal Relation	1982	PODS	0.00010310871
2,289	Windows On The World	1983	SIGMOD	8.7994393e-05
3,443	LAURA: A Formal Data Model and Her Logical Design Methodology	1983	VLDB	7.4116889e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,411	Extended Semantics for Generalization Hierarchies	1978	SIGMOD	6.7171135e-05

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3	1,829	Axiomatic Foundations and Algorithms for Deciding Semantic Equivalences of SQL Queries	2018	VLDB
4	4,267	Toward Logical Data Independence: A Relational Query Language without Relations	1982	SIGMOD
5	13,260	A Systematic Approach to Relational Database Theory	1982	SIGMOD
6	413	Relative Information Capacity of Simple Relational Database Schemata	1984	PODS
7	14,445	Using Design Axioms and Topology to Model Database Semantics	1987	VLDB
8	10	Extending the Data Base Relational Model to Capture More Meaning	1979	SIGMOD
9	4,320	Normalization and Optimization of Schema Mappings	2009	VLDB
10	589	On The Semantics Of The Relational Data Model	1975	SIGMOD