Querying Shapes of Histories

Summary: SDC, a shape-definition language for querying shapes in object histories, enables rich shape-based queries with blurry matching. Greedy operators reduce non-determinism and backtracking; includes rewrite rules and an index to speed up SDC queries. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 8485
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1995
Pagerank: 0.00011178588
Overall Rank: 1,318 | 90.96%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Rakesh Agrawal (IBM)
2. Giuseppe Psaila (IBM; Politecnico di Milano)
3. Edward L. Wimmers (IBM)
4. Mohamed Zait (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@article{agrawal_vldb95,
        title = {{Querying Shapes of Histories}},
        author = {Agrawal, Rakesh and Psaila, Giuseppe and Wimmers, Edward L. and Zait, Mohamed},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '95},
        pages = {502--513},
        year = {1995}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
190	Locally Adaptive Dimensionality Reduction for Indexing Large Time Series Databases	2001	SIGMOD	0.00026105472
303	On The Marriage of Lp-norms and Edit Distance	2004	VLDB	0.00021956234
810	Similarity-Based Queries for Time Series Data	1997	SIGMOD	0.00013874464
1,722	Indexable PLA for Efficient Similarity Search	2007	VLDB	9.9227051e-05
2,171	Multi-Dimensional Regression Analysis of Time-Series Data Streams	2002	VLDB	9.0406168e-05
3,990	Mining surprising patterns using temporal description length	1998	VLDB	6.9709253e-05
4,154	A New SQL-like Operator for Mining Association Rules	1996	VLDB	6.8670958e-05
5,152	SPIRIT: Sequential Pattern Mining with Regular Expression Constraints	1999	VLDB	6.3432765e-05
5,454	ShapeSearch: A Flexible and Efficient System for Shape-based Exploration of Trendlines	2020	SIGMOD	6.2134177e-05
8,717	T-ReX: Optimizing Pattern Search on Time Series	2023	SIGMOD	5.3774918e-05
9,482	ShapeSearch: Flexible Pattern-based Querying of Trend Line Visualizations	2018	VLDB	5.2634238e-05
10,046	Contour Map Matching for Event Detection in Sensor Networks	2006	SIGMOD	5.1699018e-05
12,936	Querying Continuous Time Sequences	1998	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
597	Composite Event Specification in Active Databases: Model & Implementation	1992	VLDB	0.00015921967
629	Composite Events for Active Databases: Semantics, Contexts and Detection	1994	VLDB	0.00015625304

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,969	Expressive and efficient pattern languages for tree-structured data (extended abstract)	2000	PODS
2	294	Graphs-at-a-time: Query Language and Access Methods for Graph Databases	2008	SIGMOD
3	1,434	A Query Language for Multidimensional Arrays: Design, Implementation, and Optimization Techniques	1996	SIGMOD
4	5,454	ShapeSearch: A Flexible and Efficient System for Shape-based Exploration of Trendlines	2020	SIGMOD
5	14,490	Interval Queries on Object Histories: Extended Abstract	1984	VLDB
6	13,040	Investigation of Algebraic Query Optimisation for Database Programming Languages	1994	VLDB
7	13,050	Database Method Schemas and Object Creation	1993	PODS
8	8,120	Formal Semantics and Analysis of Object Queries	2003	SIGMOD
9	4,467	A Query Language for List-Based Complex Objects	1994	PODS
10	4,077	Similarity-Based Queries	1995	PODS