The Nested List Normal Form for Functional and Multivalued Dependencies

Abstract. The Nested List Normal Form is proposed as a syntactic normal form for semantically well-designed database schemata obtained from any arbitrary finite nesting of records and lists. The Nested List Normal Form is defined in terms of functional and multivalued depen-dencies, independent from any specific data model, and generalises the well-known Fourth Normal Form from relational databases in order to capture more application domains.