Demo system and paper at VLDB 2021

Our demo paper "MultiCategory: Multi-model Query Processing Meets Category Theory and Functional Programming" has been accepted to the demonstrations at the conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2021. The conference will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark on August 16-20, 2021.

The variety of data is one of the important issues in the era of Big Data. The data are naturally organized in different formats and models, including structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data. Prior research has envisioned an approach to abstract multi-model data with a schema category and an instance category by using category theory (Multi-model Database Management Systems - A Look Forward, Category Theory for the Sciences, Functorial Data Migration). In this paper, we demonstrate a system, called MultiCategory, which processes multi-model queries based on category theory and functional programming. This demo is centered around four main scenarios to show a  tangible system. First, we show how to build a schema category and an instance category by loading different models of data, including relational, XML, key-value, and graph data. Second, we show a few examples of query processing by using the functional programming language Haskell. Third, we demo the flexible outputs with different models of data for the same input query.  Fourth, to better understand the category theoretical structure behind the queries, we offer a variety of graphical hooks to explore and visualize queries as graphs with respect to the schema category, as well as the query processing procedure with Haskell.

Check out the MultiCategory demo video on Youtube!