Strategies for deductive databases

Abstract

There has recently been a growing interest in combining the technologies of database management, artificial intelligence and logic programming to produce deductive database systems. An increasing number of applications, including CAD/CAM, office automation, military and medical applications, which deal with large amounts of data and require knowledge-directed processing of these shared data, necessitate this combi­ nation. This paper discusses the current strategies for deductive databases. It attempts to provide a well organized categorization of the current approaches from the point of views of their overall architecture and how successful they could ultimately be. Particular emphasis is given to query processing strategies for deductive databases. Although the paper mainly refers to the rela­ tional databases, the main motivation for us for this survey was the need to implement efficient rule evalua­ tion mechanisms for Active KDL, an object-oriented database system, which is currently under development at the University of Georgia. This led us to view the current strategics for deductive databases from an object-oriented point of view as well.