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Abstract

0. Introduction. Besides being of intrinsic interest, cylindric (semi-) lattices arise naturally from the study of dependencies in relational databases; the polynomials on a cylindric semilattice are closely related to the queries obtainable from project-join mappings on a relational database (cf. [D] for references). This note is intended to initiate the study of these structures, and only a few, rather basic results will be given. Some problems at the end will hopefully stimulate further research. Related issues are discussed in [H], and for further background material the reader is invited to consult [N]. I should like to thank H. Andréka and I. Németi for stimulating discussions on the subject.