Lesson 12.3: Reifying interfaces

In Lesson 12.1, we saw how references between object types can be stored either as relation types or as role types, as illustrated in the following examples.

In the first schema excerpt, the reference between review and book is represented by the rating relation type. In the second, it is represented by the review:reviewed role type. The process of changing a model so that a relation type is replaced by a role type is called de-reification. Similarly, the process of replacing a role type with a relation type is called reification.

In Lesson 9.7, we saw how nested relations, relations in which another relation plays a role, can be a powerful but complex feature of PERA data models. In general, nested relations are not a common feature of entity-centric models, but are used extensively in type-theoretic models. A type-theoretic model can be transformed into an entity-centric one by reifying any nested relations. Similarly, an entity-centric model can be transformed into a type-theoretic one by de-reifying any binary relation types. As we will explore in this lesson, there are some exceptions to this rule.

While de-reification is a powerful tool that allows us to achieve parity with application models, it can also break parity if not used correctly, potentially leading to loss of data or type fidelity. One of the ways this can occur is if the de-reified relation type is used to store attributes, as role types are unable to own attribute types. This was not the case for rating, so it was fine to de-reify rating by replacing it with review:reviewed as we did above. However, it was the case for another relation type we de-reified. In the original entity-centric bookstore schema, the timestamp of an action was stored on a relation of type action-execution.

The type-theoretic version in Lesson 12.1 de-reified the relation type to the role type review:reviewer. This would leave the timestamp attribute type without an object type to own it, but this was solved by relocating it to review.

This is possible because, in the entity-centric schema, action-execution has a one-to-one mapping onto review, so the two types have the same functional dependencies by the axiom of transitivity. This allows us to freely relocate interface implementations between them.

When the mapping between a relation and its roleplayer is not one-to-one, then interface implementations cannot be freely relocated between them. Consider the following relation from the entity-centric schema.

If we de-reified promotion-inclusion, then it might look as follows.

But neither promotion nor book can own discount without incurring information loss. A book may be in multiple promotions, and a promotion may contain multiple books. This means that neither has a one-to-one mapping onto the removed promotion-inclusion relation. As a result, this relation cannot be safely de-reified.

Let’s return to the definition of the Promotion class from Lesson 12.1, and now introduce a method that allows us to add books.

Initially, it seems that the only composite types involved are Book and Promotion, and that keeping the promotion-inclusion relation in the database model will result in model mismatch. However, there is a third composite type hidden within the definition of Promotion. The variable Promotion._discounts has the type dict[Book, float], which is a composition of Book and float. As the application model includes a third composite type, we require a third object type in the database model. This is represented with promotion-inclusion, which is a relation type because Promotion._discounts is composed of Book, another composite type. So in fact, de-reification would introduce model mismatch in this case, not eliminate it! We can apply this same logic to the order-line relation, demonstrating that it cannot be safely de-reified due to the quantity attribute.

While data fidelity loss occurs when the implementer of an interface is improperly de-reified, type fidelity loss occurs when a relation type hierarchy is improperly de-reified. Let’s consider the hierarchy of contribution types from the entity-centric bookstore schema.

The contributor relation type and its subtypes do not own any attributes or play any roles, so there should be no data fidelity loss in using the following type-theoretic model instead.

However, we run into an issue if we would like to query all contributors to a book. We saw in Lesson 9.6 that we can use the following pattern to do so with the entity-centric schema.

This works because the pattern assigns $person the type contribution:contributor, which is also cast into its subtypes authoring:author, editing:editor, and illustrating:illustrator by inheritance polymorphism. But if we try a similar pattern with the type-theoretic schema, it does not work.

This is because book:contributor has no subtypes. The four roles of book are not in a hierarchy, so we have to use the following pattern instead.

Once again, de-reification has resulted in information loss. This time, the lost information is not an attribute’s owner but a role’s supertype. The PERA model does not allow us to model a role type hierarchy without an associated relation type hierarchy, as this could lead to ambiguities in the interpretation of queries. As such, we cannot de-reify contribution without this loss of role type fidelity. If we examine the Book class, we once again see that there is a hidden composite type corresponding to the relation type: Book._contributors, which has type set[tuple[Contributor, ContributorRole]].

In general, the storage of composite objects in collections are best modeled as relations in the database, with one role referencing the containing collection object (e.g. promotion-inclusion:promotion, order-line:order, contribution:work) and the other referencing the contained objects (e.g. promotion-inclusion:item, order-line:item, contribution:contributor). This will normally ensure close parity to the application model and prevent data or type fidelity loss. As always when modeling, this should be taken as a guideline and not a rule.