Lenses, fibrations and universal translations

Abstract

This paper extends the ‘lens’ concept for view updating in Computer Science beyond the categories of sets and ordered sets. It is first shown that a constant complement view updating strategy also corresponds to a lens for a categorical database model. A variation on the lens concept called a c-lens is introduced, and shown to correspond to the categorical notion of Grothendieck opfibration. This variant guarantees a universal solution to the view update problem for functorial update processes.