research

My general research interests are in database theory and systems. I am particularly interested in web data management (e.g., RDF and XML) . If you are a student and this research sounds interesting to you, I have a list of thesis project ideas.

My current research is funded externally by NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) and Agentschap NL (the Netherlands Ministry for Economic Affairs, Agriculture, and Innovation).

selected papers

Some research results are posted here. For more details, you can also check out my entries at DBLP, DBLife, and CSB. If you have any comments, criticism, or suggestions, I would appreciate hearing from you.

• On guarded simulations and acyclic first-order languages. George H.L. Fletcher, Jan Hidders, Stijn Vansummeren, Yongming Luo, Francois Picalausa, and Paul De Bra. DBPL 2011, Seattle.
• Relative expressive power of navigational querying on graphs. George H.L. Fletcher, Marc Gyssens, Dirk Leinders, Jan Van den Bussche, Dirk Van Gucht, Stijn Vansummeren, and Yuqing Wu. ICDT 2011, Uppsala.
• Towards a theory of search queries. George H.L. Fletcher, Jan Van den Bussche, Dirk Van Gucht, and Stijn Vansummeren. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 35(4), 2010.
• Towards a general framework for effective solutions to the data mapping problem. George H.L. Fletcher and Catherine M. Wyss. Journal on Data Semantics XIV, 2009.
• Scalable indexing of RDF graphs for efficient join processing. George H.L. Fletcher and Peter W. Beck. CIKM 2009, Hong Kong.
• Towards well-behaved schema evolution. Rada Chirkova and George H.L. Fletcher. WebDB 2009, Providence.
• On the expressive power of the relational algebra on finite sets of relation pairs. George H.L. Fletcher, Marc Gyssens, Jan Paredaens, and Dirk Van Gucht. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 21(6):939-942, 2009.
• Thinking about computational thinking. James J. Lu and George H.L. Fletcher. SIGCSE 2009, Chattanooga. Shorter version also appeared in Communications of the ACM, 52(2):23-25, 2009.
• An algebra for basic graph patterns. George H.L. Fletcher. Logic in Databases 2008, Rome.
• A methodology for coupling fragments of XPath with structural indexes for XML documents. George H.L. Fletcher, Dirk Van Gucht, Yuqing Wu, Marc Gyssens, Sofía Brenes, and Jan Paredaens. DBPL 2007, Vienna. Full version in Information Systems 34(7):657-670, 2009.
• Structural characterizations of the semantics of XPath as navigation tool on a document. Marc Gyssens, Jan Paredaens, Dirk Van Gucht, and George H.L. Fletcher. PODS 2006, Chicago.
• Data mapping as search. George H.L. Fletcher and Catharine M. Wyss. EDBT 2006, Munich.
• A calculus for data mapping. George H.L. Fletcher, Catharine M. Wyss, Edward L. Robertson, and Dirk Van Gucht. ENTCS 150(2): 37-54, 2006.
• Relational data mapping in MIQIS. George H.L. Fletcher and Catharine M. Wyss. SIGMOD 2005, Baltimore.
• MIQIS: modular integration of queryable information sources. Catharine M. Wyss, George H.L. Fletcher, Fulya Erdinc, and Jeremy T. Engle. IIWeb 2004, Toronto.
• Unstructured peer-to-peer networks: topological properties and search performance. George H.L. Fletcher, Hardik Sheth, and Katy Börner. AP2PC 2004, New York.