Data exchange, also known as data translation, has been extensively investigated in recent years. One main direction of research has focused on the semantics and the complexity of answering first-order queries in the context of data exchange between relational schemas. In this paper, we initiate a systematic investigation of the semantics and the complexity of aggregate queries in data exchange, and make a number of conceptual and technical contributions. Data exchange is a context in which incomplete information arises, hence one has to cope with a set of possible worlds, instead of a single database. Three different sets of possible worlds have been explored in the study of the certain answers of first-order queries in data exchange: the set of possible worlds of all solutions, the set of possible worlds of all universal solutions, and a set of possible worlds derived from the CWA-solutions. We examine each of these sets and point out that none of them is suitable for aggregation in...
Foto N. Afrati, Phokion G. Kolaitis