This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to the evolution of the database field from its earliest stages up to the present-and from classical relational database management systems to the current Big Data metaphor. In particular, it gathers the most significant research from the Italian database community that had relevant intersections with international projects. Big Data technology is currently dominating both the market and research. The book provides readers with a broad overview of key research efforts in modelling, querying and analysing data, which, over the last few decades, have became massive and heterogeneous areas.

This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to the evolution of the database field from its earliest stages up to the present-and from classical relational database management systems to the current Big Data metaphor. In particular, it gathers the most significant research from the Italian database community that had relevant intersections with international projects. Big Data technology is currently dominating both the market and research. The book provides readers with a broad overview of key research efforts in modelling, querying and analysing data, which, over the last few decades, have became massive and heterogeneous areas.

The use of logic in databases started in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s Codd formalized databases in terms of the relational calculus and the relational algebra. A major influence on the use of logic in databases was the development of the field of logic programming. Logic provides a convenient formalism for studying classical database problems and has the important property of being declarative, that is, it allows one to express what she wants rather than how to get it. For a long time, relational calculus and algebra were considered the relational database languages. However, there are simple operations, such as computing the transitive closure of a graph, which cannot be expressed with these languages. Datalog is a declarative query language for relational databases based on the logic programming paradigm. One of the peculiarities that distinguishes Datalog from query languages like relational algebra and calculus is recursion, which gives Datalog the capability to express queries like computing a graph transitive closure. Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Datalog in a variety of emerging application domains such as data integration, information extraction, networking, program analysis, security, cloud computing, ontology reasoning, and many others. The aim of this book is to present the basics of Datalog, some of its extensions, and recent applications to different domains.

The chase has long been used as a central tool to analyze dependencies and their effect on queries. It has been applied to different relevant problems in database theory such as query optimization, query containment and equivalence, dependency implication, and database schema design. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the chase as an important tool in several database applications, such as data exchange and integration, query answering in incomplete data, and many others. It is well known that the chase algorithm might be non-terminating and thus, in order for it to find practical applicability, it is crucial to identify cases where its termination is guaranteed. Another important aspect to consider when dealing with the chase is that it can introduce null values into the database, thereby leading to incomplete data. Thus, in several scenarios where the chase is used the problem of dealing with data dependencies and incomplete data arises. This book discusses fundamental issues concerning data dependencies and incomplete data with a particular focus on the chase and its applications in different database areas. We report recent results about the crucial issue of identifying conditions that guarantee the chase termination. Different database applications where the chase is a central tool are discussed with particular attention devoted to query answering in the presence of data dependencies and database schema design. Table of Contents: Introduction / Relational Databases / Incomplete Databases / The Chase Algorithm / Chase Termination / Data Dependencies and Normal Forms / Universal Repairs / Chase and Database Applications

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management, SUM 2008, held in Naples, Italy, in Oktober 2008.

The 27 revised full papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 3 invited talks/tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers address artificial intelligence researchers, database researchers, and practitioners to demonstrate theoretical techniques required to manage the uncertainty that arises in large scale real world applications and to cope with large volumes of uncertainty and inconsistency in databases, the Web, the semantic Web, and artificial intelligence in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2019, held in Amantea, Italy, in July 2019. The 27 full papers and 10 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. The papers present emerging research trends with a special focus on flexible querying and analytics for smart cities and smart societies in the age of big data. They are organized in the following topical sections: flexible database management and querying; ontologies and knowledge bases; social networks and social media; argumentation-based query answering; data mining and knowledge discovery; advanced flexible query answering methodologies and techniques; flexible query answering methods and techniques; flexible intelligent information-oriented and network-oriented approaches; big data veracity and soft computing; flexibility in tools; and systems and miscellanea.