THE GPR System: An Architecture for Integrating Active and Deductive Rules on Complex Database Objects

Abstract

This paper illustrates a prototype system, called GPRS, supporting the Generalized Production Rules (GPR) data-base language. The GPR language integrates, in a unified framework, active rules, which allow the specification of event driven computations on data, and deductive rules, which can be used to derive intensional relations in the style of logic programming. The prototype realizes the operational semantics of GPR using a unique rule-evaluation engine. The data model of reference is object based and the system is implemented on top of an object oriented DBMS. Hence, the GPRS prototype represents a concrete proposal of an advanced DBMS for complex objects that provides both active and deductive styles of rule programming. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.