A logical approach to cooperative information systems

Abstract

“Cooperative information system management” refers to the capacity of several computing systems to communicate and cooperate in order to acquire, store, manage, query data and knowledge. Current solutions to the problem of cooperative information management are still far from being satisfactory. In particular, they lack the ability to fully model cooperation among heterogeneous systems according to a declarative style. The use of a logical approach to model all aspects of cooperation seems very promising. In this paper, we define a logical language able to support cooperative queries, updates and update propagation. We model the sources of information as deductive databases, sharing the same logical language to express queries and updates, but containing independent, even if possibly related, data. We use the Obj-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, G. Guerrini, D. Montesi, Toward deductive object databases, Theory and Practice of Object Systems 1 (1) (1995) 19–39) language to model queries and transactions in each source of data. Such language is then extended to deal with active rules in the style of Active-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, B. Catania, V. Gervasi, A. Raffaetà, Active-U-Datalog: Integrating active rules in a logical update language, in: B. Freitag, H. Decker, M. Kifer, A. Voronkov (Eds.), LBCS 1472: Transactions and Change in Login Databases, 1998, pp. 106–132; V. Gervasi, A. Raffaetà, Active-U-Datalog: Integrating Active Rules in a Deductive Database, Technical Report 97–19, Dipartimento di Informatica, Pisa, Italy, 1997), interpreted according to the PARK semantics proposed in G. Gottlob, G. Moerkotte, V.S. Subrahmanian (The PARK semantics for active rules, in: P.M.G. Apers, M. Bouzeghoub, G. Gardarin (Eds.), LNCS 1057: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 1996, pp. 35–55). By using active rules, a system can efficiently perform update propagation among different databases. The result is a logical environment, integrating active and deductive rules, to perform update propagation in a cooperative framework.