New type of coding problem motivated by database theory Original Research Article

The present paper is intended to survey the interaction between relational database theory and coding theory. In particular it is shown how an extremal problem for relational databases gives rise to a new type of coding problem. The former concerns minimal representation of branching dependencies that can be considered as a data mining type question. The extremal configurations involve d-distance sets in the space of disjoint pairs of image-element subsets of an image-element set image. Let image be an image-element finite set, image an integer. Suppose that image and image are pairs of disjoint image-element subsets of image (that is, image). Define the distance of these pairs by image.