Representing Roles in Universal Scheme Interfaces
David Maier, David Rozenshtein, Jacob Stein · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 1985
Users of a relational database must explicitly navigate between relations in order to establish a connection among a set of attributes spanning several relation schemes. While a universal scheme interface to a relational database provides users with automatic navigation, it usually imposes on the database a unique role assumption. This assumption requires every attribute name to represent a unique role in the database, so that connections among sets of attributes are unambiguous.