QUERY ABBREVIATION IN THE ENTITY-RELATIONSHIP DATA MODEL

This paper examines the idea of context inference, which is the ability of a query processor to infer the appropriate relationships between the classes mentioned in a query. Context inference has been the basis of Universal Instance (UI) data models. We show that context inference can be applied to the Entity-Relationship model, resulting in a compact, high-level language without the undesirable restrictions associated with UI databases. We also show how the traditional notions of inheritance and path expressions can be considered to be special cases of context inference.