This book takes readers through the sensational history of blockchains and their potential to revolutionize database systems of the future. In order to demystify blockchains, the book capitalizes on decades of research and field testing of existing database and distributed systems and applies these familiar concepts to the novel blockchain system. It then utilizes this framework to explore the essential block platform underpinning blockchains, which is often misunderstood as a specific attribute of cryptocurrencies rather than the core of the decentralized system independent of application....

This book details recent developments in the emerging area of plug-and-play (PnP) visual subgraph query interfaces (VQI). These PnP interfaces are grounded in the principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) and cognitive psychology to address long-standing limitations to bottom-up search capabilities in graph databases using traditional graph query languages, which often require domain experts and specialist programmers. This book explains how PnP interfaces go against the traditional mantra of VQI construction by taking a data-drivenapproach and giving end users the freedom to easily and...

This book examines the recent trend of extending data dependencies to adapt to rich data types in order to address variety and veracity issues in big data. Readers will be guided through the full range of rich data types where data dependencies have been successfully applied, including categorical data with equality relationships, heterogeneous data with similarity relationships, numerical data with order relationships, sequential data with timestamps, and graph data with complicated structures. The text will also discuss interesting constraints on ordering or similarity relationships...