Towards Theory for Real-World Data

Summary: Advocates grounding theory of data‑manipulation languages in empirical analysis of real datasets, schemas, and query logs to expose recurrent structures and frequently co‑used features in tree/graph data. Surveys practical studies and distills lessons from >850M queries to identify tractable fragments, common optimization opportunities, and usability gaps that should guide language design and theory. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h5edf2019a3e56811
Venue: PODS
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.2102846e-05
Overall Rank: 9,185 | 38.27%
DOI: 10.1145/3517804.3526066

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Wim Martens (University of Bayreuth)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{martens_pods22,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '22},
        title = {{Towards Theory for Real-World Data}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517804.3526066},
        doi = {10.1145/3517804.3526066},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Martens, Wim},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,989	Schema-Based Query Optimisation for Graph Databases	2025	SIGMOD	5.0989764e-05
10,171	Exploiting Structure in Regular Expression Queries	2023	SIGMOD	5.0658661e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
305	A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion	1987	SIGMOD	0.00021580917
409	Containment and Equivalence for an XPath Fragment [Extended Abstract]	2002	PODS	0.00018859247
540	An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs	2018	VLDB	0.0001671863
720	Querying Graph Databases	2013	PODS	0.00014522278
1,494	Graph Pattern Matching in GQL and SQL/PGQ	2022	SIGMOD	0.00010497226
1,807	Validating Streaming XML Documents	2002	PODS	9.5917716e-05
2,526	Path Queries on Compressed XML	2003	VLDB	8.3393779e-05
2,831	PG-Keys: Keys for Property Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	7.9564949e-05
3,244	Inference of Concise DTDs from XML Data	2006	VLDB	7.4956321e-05
3,354	JSON: Data model, Query languages and Schema specification	2017	PODS	7.3858289e-05
3,917	JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data	2021	SIGMOD	6.925328e-05
5,113	A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs	2013	PODS	6.2665528e-05
7,465	Reducing Ambiguity in Json Schema Discovery	2021	SIGMOD	5.5187501e-05
8,103	BonXai: Combining the simplicity of DTD with the expressiveness of XML Schema	2015	PODS	5.3917406e-05
9,431	Decidable XPath Fragments in the Real World	2019	PODS	5.1773868e-05
10,157	Threshold Queries in Theory and in the Wild	2022	VLDB	5.0691578e-05
10,242	SHARQL: Shape Analysis of Recursive SPARQL Queries	2020	SIGMOD	5.0519762e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,516	Exploring the Data Wilderness through Examples	2019	SIGMOD
2	6,022	Tables As a Paradigm for Querying and Restructuring	1996	PODS
3	289	Graphs-at-a-time: Query Language and Access Methods for Graph Databases	2008	SIGMOD
4	3,313	Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2009	SIGMOD
5	9,082	Machine Learning for Graph Data Management and Query Processing	2025	VLDB
6	13,318	Tutorial: Languages for Collection Types	1994	PODS
7	8,188	Full-Power Graph Querying: State of the Art and Challenges	2023	VLDB
8	6,487	Modern Techniques for Querying Graph-Structured Relations: Foundations, System Implementations, and Open Challenges	2022	VLDB
9	8,840	Graph Data Models, Query Languages and Programming Paradigms	2018	VLDB
10	4,189	Processing Queries on Tree-Structured Data Efficiently	2006	PODS