An Algebra for PowerPoint Sources

There are now millions of PowerPoint documents available within corporate intranets and/or over the Internet. In this paper, we develop a formal model of PowerPoint databases. We propose a relational style algebra called pptA (PowerPoint Algebra) to query PowerPoint databases. The algebra contains some new operators (such as the APPLY operator that changes properties of objects, slides and presentations) as well as interesting twists on relational operators (e.g. join and cartesian product allow different entities being joined together to share attributes whose values may be merged). We prove a set of equivalence results within this algebra. We have implemented a version of pptA—the paper provides a cost model and experimental results on the conditions under which these equivalences are useful.