The Functional Approach to Data Management: Modelling, Analysing and Integrating Heterogeneous Data

This collection of papers provides a highly theoretical as well as practical coverage of developments in the functional approach to data modelling. The main thrust is to expound on the solutions for uniformly storing data from many different sources without regard to the way in which it is stored. By the use of transformation using mathematical principles, data is made accessible in multivarious ways while offering transparency. The preface contains the following explanation “The crucial insight was that the functional abstraction creates a uniform way of viewing data, regardless of how it is stored. …when integrating data from many different sources, … it is important to hide these storage details and work at a higher conceptual level”. Chapter coverage includes: functional data language; referential transparency; data transformation and integration; query languages; functional queries; functional data integration; query processing; internet applications; metadata. Contributors are drawn from Australia, Greece, USA, France, Germany, Sweden, Singapore and the UK. The universities in the UK are: Edinburgh, Manchester, Aberdeen and Birkbeck College.