Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Reshaped relational algebra


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. HJ Mitchell &#124;  Penny for your thoughts?   01:43, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Reshaped relational algebra

 * – ( View AfD View log )

All references are to Raz or his grad students, and most of article consists of scans from Raz (1987). SarekOfVulcan (talk) 05:56, 10 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 15:45, 10 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Question: do we have copyright clearance for Raz 1987? If not it's an easy delete. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:55, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, we do. https://sites.google.com/site/yoavraz2/home/wikipedia-copyright-permission -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 14:59, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for hunting that down. Stuartyeates (talk) 19:21, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Wifione  Message 09:57, 17 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete (including associated scans/images) The only independent mention I could find is in Parent, C.; Spaccapietra, S.; "An Algebra for a General Entity-Relationship Model". IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 11 (7): "Chen's approach [51], [151] includes operators on both entities and relationships, while Markovitz and Raz [131] turn entities and relationships into one single representation on which a reshaped relational algebra is applied." Too trivial to establish notability. —Ruud 14:32, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * "Too trivial to establish notability." It is quite surprising to see such a claim from a person with degrees in Math and CS: This is misunderstanding of the entire subject and the purpose of RRA. Your citation above is from an article that compares ER algebras technically, without a judgement like yours, and it does not dare to make an outrageous claim like yours: "Trivial". It is far away from being trivial. RRA's purpose was to make a useful bridge from the Entity-relationship model (ERM) to the the relational model, and I consider it a huge success: Capturing the basic structure of Natural languages and extending the the static intuition captured by the ERM to relational languages (and others). RRA fulfills its purpose wonderfully for allowing to define accurate semantics for ERROL and implement it effectively over relational databases. ERROL is very notable, and ERROL is defined by RRA. At this point ERROL does not have life without RRA! (and I wonder if ever a better alternative to RRA is found: It is lean and mean and to the point). You have missed this "minor" point. --ERfan111 (talk) 19:58, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Instead of making empty statements such as "outrageous claim" and "very notable", would you consider finding and listing some independent papers discussing RRA in (a bit) greater detail than the one I managed to find above? You'll find that this approach will be significantly more successful in convincing people that this article should be kept. —Ruud 22:32, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Let's first clearly separate two issues:
 * Expertise in the area, and
 * Counting references.
 * In your input above you pretend to be an expert: "Too trivial to establish notability." You belittle RRA. No, actually nullifying it ("trivial"), pretending to have the authority to do so. You do not mention references count. Well, let me put some content into my "empty statements:" You do not have a clue about what you are talking, and make false conclusions from a correct quotation. I say this with all the responsibility. First the quotation does not have any negative connotation which you put. Second, though both entities and relationships are represented by relations, they have different structures (symmetry breaking by ER compatibility and inclusion dependencies) and play different roles in RRA expressions. Third, I view it as a big achievement, to produce an algebra that captures a relational complete segment of the English language (and other natural languages) and allows to express all the queries common in most other database query languages (relational complete). This was the reason for me to initiate this article (not knowing about the process of checking before and getting consensus). Thus your arguments which I call "outrageous" stem from misunderstanding of the subject. Thus, please avoid comments like "Too trivial to be notable" about subject you have no understanding in, where you pretend to be an expert, and based on this make comments to delete an article. Now to counting:
 * First, as you should know, academic articles cite, but at most give only a brief description and possibly a brief comparison. Only text-books expand. Based on Google scholar the count I made is as follows (excluding the original authors' articles; using respective terms from articles' names): "modified relational algebra"+Markowitz: 6 citations; "entity relationship algebra"+Markowitz: 6; "reshaped relational algebra": 2. But this is not the whole story: as I said elsewhere here RRA is a building-block of ERROL which is cited much more (ERROL+Markowitz: ~100 - without the authors), without going into its implementation and semantics, i.e., without explicitly citing RRA. Quite notable for research language+algebra+prototype. How many citations are needed to be "notable?" Hundreds and more read it at different levels of thoroughness even if not cited massively.
 * --ERfan111 (talk) 00:01, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Please read my comment again. I did not call RRA trivial, I called the citation trivial (merely mentioning the existence of RRA, instead of trying to discuss it at any length). I agree that academic papers usually only give "a brief description and possibly a brief comparison", but even this is not the case here. —Ruud 02:48, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I now see I misread your comment, and deeply apologize. To my defense I can only say that it is ambiguous, but I completely believe you. I remove the parts that reflect this misunderstanding. Regarding citing: I should have said "brief description at most," usually not even this.--ERfan111 (talk) 07:08, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, we've just deleted Yoav Raz at AfD, so this is next? As nom says, all the citations are to Raz and his team, so it looks like a fringe theory page without reliable, independent references, hence fails WP:N. It also looks very strange given the permission-given copying and scanning - if it's to be kept, it needs major cleanup. And it may be too technical for WP readers, would need serious wikifying and rewriting. But as it stands it's Delete. Unless anyone feels like adding reliable independent sources? Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:34, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * No. As was said above RRA is an integral part of ERROL. The success and notability of ERROL is the success of RRA (see above). RRA has a separate article since it has life of its own beyond ERROL, it is very mathematical (byond ERROL; like many other WP Math article), and its article is sufficiently long not to be merged to the ERROL article (3 reasons).--ERfan111 (talk) 19:58, 21 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Weak Delete. There are references, but they seem to all be from a team at a single theoretical computer science department. They think this formulation is important but everyone else is pretty much ignoring it. This isn't fringe (in the wikipedia sense of false and opposed to mainstream), but non-notable meaning ignored by the mainstream. Dingo1729 (talk) 17:01, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Indeed it is not false or opposed to main stream. Relational tech is dominated by SQL with tremendous investment and inertia, and it is unlikely that alternatives are used in the foreseen future. Thus no wonder here that RRA (with English/ERROL) have not been considered and adopted for relational. However it has a good chance of utilization in new data management applications, for example around the Web. ERfan111 (talk) 13:38, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * See above a citation not from the creators team. --ERfan111 (talk) 19:58, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
 * See above citation counts. --ERfan111 (talk) 00:01, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


 *  Weak Delete as above. If kept it needs to be rewritten to use unicode mathematics characters rather than the current images. Stuartyeates (talk) 08:19, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Changed vote from Weak Delete to Delete after reading subsequent discussions here. Stuartyeates (talk) 00:12, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The argument resulted from my misunderstanding of Ruud's comment. I apologized and removed my related text. ERfan111 (talk) 13:38, 23 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Keep. Just noticed deletion tag. Also Yoav Raz deleted. Will be difficult to remove all his important work. Not much is directly quoted about RRA (but rather through ERROL), but I consider it important since it introduces a new approach to database languages, which is user friendly due to closeness to natural language. The description of ERROL is incomplete without a complete specification of RRA. Other, more general aspects of RRA are described as well. The RRA approach is targeted on the relational model, but can be also applied to other data models. Yes, if the jpgs are a concern they can be converted manually to text (some work needed).
 * I see after the deletion tag daily viewing jumped from about 10 to 350 (but unfortunately not too many here). If so many people are interested, have your voice here. Anybody can add their opinion to try to keep it. ERfan111 (talk) 08:16, 18 November 2011 (UTC) — ERfan111 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.