Integrity Constraint Checking in Federated Databases

A federated database is comprised of multiple interconnected databases that cooperate in an autonomous fashion. Global integrity constraints are very useful in federated databases, but the lack of global queries, global transaction mechanisms, and global concurrency control renders traditional constraint management techniques inapplicable. The paper presents a threefold contribution to integrity constraint checking in federated databases: (1) the problem of constraint checking in a federated database environment is clearly formulated; (2) a family of cooperative protocols for constraint checking is presented; (3) the differences across protocols in the family are analyzed with respect to system requirements, properties guaranteed, and costs involved. Thus, we provide a suite of options with protocols for various environments with specific system capabilities and integrity requirement

Protocols for Integrity Constraint Checking in Federated Databases

A federated database is comprised of multiple interconnected database systems that primarily operate independently but cooperate to a certain extent. Global integrity constraints can be very useful in federated databases, but the lack of global queries, global transaction mechanisms, and global concurrency control renders traditional constraint management techniques inapplicable. This paper presents a threefold contribution to integrity constraint checking in federated databases: (1) The problem of constraint checking in a federated database environment is clearly formulated. (2) A family of protocols for constraint checking is presented. (3) The differences across protocols in the family are analyzed with respect to system requirements, properties guaranteed by the protocols, and processing and communication costs. Thus, our work yields a suite of options from which a protocol can be chosen to suit the system capabilities and integrity requirements of a particular federated database environment

The DLV System for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

This paper presents the DLV system, which is widely considered the state-of-the-art implementation of disjunctive logic programming, and addresses several aspects. As for problem solving, we provide a formal definition of its kernel language, function-free disjunctive logic programs (also known as disjunctive datalog), extended by weak constraints, which are a powerful tool to express optimization problems. We then illustrate the usage of DLV as a tool for knowledge representation and reasoning, describing a new declarative programming methodology which allows one to encode complex problems (up to $\Delta^P_3$-complete problems) in a declarative fashion. On the foundational side, we provide a detailed analysis of the computational complexity of the language of DLV, and by deriving new complexity results we chart a complete picture of the complexity of this language and important fragments thereof. Furthermore, we illustrate the general architecture of the DLV system which has been influenced by these results. As for applications, we overview application front-ends which have been developed on top of DLV to solve specific knowledge representation tasks, and we briefly describe the main international projects investigating the potential of the system for industrial exploitation. Finally, we report about thorough experimentation and benchmarking, which has been carried out to assess the efficiency of the system. The experimental results confirm the solidity of DLV and highlight its potential for emerging application areas like knowledge management and information integration.Comment: 56 pages, 9 figures, 6 table

The Constructive method for query containment checking (extended version)

We present a new method that checks Query Containment for queries with negated derived atoms and/or integrity constraints. Existing methods for Query Containment checking that deal with these cases do not check actually containment but another related property called uniform containment, which is a sufficient but not necessary condition for containment. Our method can be seen as an extension of the canonical databases approach beyond the class of conjunctive queries.Postprint (published version

Cost and Performance Analysis of Integrity Validation Techniques for a Distributed Database

A principal problem with the use of integrity constraints for monitoring the integrity of a dynamically changing database is their cost of evaluation. This cost which is associated with the performance of the checking mechanisms is the main quantitative measure which has to be supervised carefully. We have developed an integrity constraint subsystem for a relational distributed database (SICSDD) which consists of several techniques that are necessary for efficient constraint checking, particularly in a distributed environment where data distribution is transparent to the application domain. In this paper, we will show how these techniques have effectively reduced the cost of constraint checking in such a distributed environment

Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200

Parametric Connectives in Disjunctive Logic Programming

Disjunctive Logic Programming (\DLP) is an advanced formalism for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR). \DLP is very expressive in a precise mathematical sense: it allows to express every property of finite structures that is decidable in the complexity class \SigmaP{2} (\NP^{\NP}). Importantly, the \DLP encodings are often simple and natural. In this paper, we single out some limitations of \DLP for KRR, which cannot naturally express problems where the size of the disjunction is not known ``a priori'' (like N-Coloring), but it is part of the input. To overcome these limitations, we further enhance the knowledge modelling abilities of \DLP, by extending this language by {\em Parametric Connectives (OR and AND)}. These connectives allow us to represent compactly the disjunction/conjunction of a set of atoms having a given property. We formally define the semantics of the new language, named $DLP^{\bigvee,\bigwedge}$ and we show the usefulness of the new constructs on relevant knowledge-based problems. We address implementation issues and discuss related works