CSDL Home IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering 1997 vol.9 Issue No.06 - November-December
Issue No.06 - November-December (1997 vol.9)
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/69.649312
<p><b>Abstract</b>—We address the problem of providing a homogeneous framework for integrating, in a database environment, <it>active rules</it>, which allow the specification of actions to be executed whenever certain events take place, and <it>deductive rules</it>, which allow the specification of deductions in a logic programming style. Actually, it is widely recognized that both kinds of rules enhance the capabilities of database systems since they provide very natural mechanisms for the management of various important activities (e.g., knowledge representation, complex data manipulation, integrity constraint enforcement, view maintenance). However, in spite of their strong relationship, little work has been done on the unification of these powerful paradigms. In this paper, we present a rule-based language with an event-driven semantics that allows programmers to express both active and deductive computations. The language is based on a new notion of production rules whose effect is both a change of state and an answer to a query. By using several examples, we show that this simple language schema allows us to uniformly define different computations on data, including complex data manipulations, deductive evaluations, and active rule processing. We define the semantics of the language and then describe the architecture of a preliminary implementation of the language. Finally, we report about application and experience of use of the language.</p>
Active databases, deductive databases, query languages, semantics of rule systems, integration of database languages, complex objects.
Luigi Palopoli, Riccardo Torlone, "Generalized Production Rules as a Basis for Integrating Active and Deductive Databases", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, vol.9, no. 6, pp. 848-862, November-December 1997, doi:10.1109/69.649312