Perspectives in deductive databases

AbstractI discuss my experiences, some of the work that I have done, and related work that influenced me, concerning deductive databases, over the last 30 years. I divide this time period into three roughly equal parts: 1957–1968, 1969–1978, 1979–present. For the first I describe how my interest started in deductive databases in 1957, at a time when the field of databases did not even exist. I describe work in the beginning years, leading to the start of deductive databases about 1968 with the work of Cordell Green and Bertram Raphael. The second period saw a great deal of work in theorem providing as well as the introduction of logic programming. The existence and importance of deductive databases as a formal and viable discipline received its impetus at a workshop held in Toulouse, France, in 1977, which culminated in the book Logic and Data Bases. The relationship of deductive databases and logic programming was recognized at that time. During the third period we have seen formal theories of databases come about as an outgrowth of that work, and the recognition that artificial intelligence and deductive databases are closely related, at least through the so-called expert database systems. I expect that the relationships between techniques from formal logic, databases, logic programming, and artificial intelligence will continue to be explored and the field of deductive databases will become a more prominent area of computer science in coming years

Data bases and data base systems related to NASA's aerospace program. A bibliography with indexes

This bibliography lists 1778 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system, 1975 through 1980

SQUALID: A deductive DBMS

Most modern companies probably could not function without a database management system (DBMS). Although current DBMSs are becoming increasingly sophisticated, they are still deficient in several areas. One of these areas is deduction. Human beings have the interesting ability to derive facts from a set of data, even though these facts are not explicitly represented in the data. That is, given appropriate information, humans can deduce new information by applying rules. A deductive database is a database which can perform similar deductions on the data stored within it. This has the advantage that some data can be stored implicitly using rules, rather than explicitly. This reduces the amount of storage the database occupies. The use of rules also allows us to store new kinds of data, such as recursive data or indefinite data. Several deductive database systems have been developed, but many of them only approach the problem from a theoretical point of view; practical considerations such as efficiency and ease of use for end-users have often been neglected. Many systems were also developed completely from scratch, rather than taking advantage of existing facilities. That is, it should be possible to take an existing DBMS, and extend it with deductive capabilities. In this work we introduce the concept of a deductive database, and some of the problems associated with implementing such a system. We then discuss the implementation of a system called SQUALID (for Structured Query And Logical Inference Database). This system is based on an existing DBMS, Rdb/VMS, which has been extended with facilities for creating and manipulating rules. An extended version of the standard query language SQL is used. 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