We examine the role that atoms of regular languages play in boolean automata. We observe that the size of a minimal boolean automaton of a regular language is directly related to the number of atoms of the language. We present a method to construct minimal boolean automata, using the atoms of a given regular language. The "illegal" cover problem of the Kameda-Weiner method for NFA minimization implies that using the union operation only to construct an automaton from a cover - as is the case with NFAs -, is not sufficient. We show that by using the union and the intersection operations (without the complementation operation), it is possible to construct boolean automata accepting a given language, for a given maximal cover.

We present a reinterpretation of the Kameda-Weiner method of finding a minimal nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) of a language, in terms of atoms of the language. We introduce a method to generate NFAs from a set of languages, and show that the Kameda-Weiner method is a special case of it. Our method provides a unified view of the construction of several known NFAs, including the canonical residual finite state automaton and the atomaton of the language.

Current data management and information retrieval systems lack advanced string processing capabilities needed in string-oriented application areas like computational molecular biology. Several theoretical models for string processing and querying have been proposed but they either have not been implemented in practice or the implementations are too restricted or platform-dependent to be generally useful. We propose a design for a string processing method that could be used to extend different kinds of data management systems by trying to minimise the interconnections between the database management system and the string handling part. The work continues the development of the Alignment Declaration language, our proposal for specifying string relations, by presenting a new and improved method for evaluating the queries and analysing their finiteness.