1,208 research outputs found
Towards Intelligent Databases
This article is a presentation of the objectives and techniques
of deductive databases. The deductive approach to databases aims at extending
with intensional definitions other database paradigms that describe
applications extensionaUy. We first show how constructive specifications can
be expressed with deduction rules, and how normative conditions can be defined
using integrity constraints. We outline the principles of bottom-up and
top-down query answering procedures and present the techniques used for
integrity checking. We then argue that it is often desirable to manage with
a database system not only database applications, but also specifications of
system components. We present such meta-level specifications and discuss
their advantages over conventional approaches
Expressiveness of Temporal Query Languages: On the Modelling of Intervals, Interval Relationships and States
Storing and retrieving time-related information are important, or even critical, tasks on many areas of Computer Science (CS) and in particular for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The expressive power of temporal databases/query languages has been studied from different perspectives, but the kind of temporal information they are able to store and retrieve is not always conveniently addressed. Here we assess a number of temporal query languages with respect to the modelling of time intervals, interval relationships and states, which can be thought of as the building blocks to represent and reason about a large and important class of historic information. To survey the facilities and issues which are particular to certain temporal query languages not only gives an idea about how useful they can be in particular contexts, but also gives an interesting insight in how these issues are, in many cases, ultimately inherent to the database paradigm. While in the area of AI declarative languages are usually the preferred choice, other areas of CS heavily rely on the extended relational paradigm. This paper, then, will be concerned with the representation of historic information in two well known temporal query languages: it Templog in the context of temporal deductive databases, and it TSQL2 in the context of temporal relational databases. We hope the results highlighted here will increase cross-fertilisation between different communities. This article can be related to recent publications drawing the attention towards the different approaches followed by the Databases and AI communities when using time-related concepts
Twelve Theses on Reactive Rules for the Web
Reactivity, the ability to detect and react to events, is an
essential functionality in many information systems. In particular, Web
systems such as online marketplaces, adaptive (e.g., recommender) systems,
and Web services, react to events such as Web page updates or
data posted to a server.
This article investigates issues of relevance in designing high-level programming
languages dedicated to reactivity on the Web. It presents
twelve theses on features desirable for a language of reactive rules tuned
to programming Web and Semantic Web applications
A General Framework for Representing, Reasoning and Querying with Annotated Semantic Web Data
We describe a generic framework for representing and reasoning with annotated
Semantic Web data, a task becoming more important with the recent increased
amount of inconsistent and non-reliable meta-data on the web. We formalise the
annotated language, the corresponding deductive system and address the query
answering problem. Previous contributions on specific RDF annotation domains
are encompassed by our unified reasoning formalism as we show by instantiating
it on (i) temporal, (ii) fuzzy, and (iii) provenance annotations. Moreover, we
provide a generic method for combining multiple annotation domains allowing to
represent, e.g. temporally-annotated fuzzy RDF. Furthermore, we address the
development of a query language -- AnQL -- that is inspired by SPARQL,
including several features of SPARQL 1.1 (subqueries, aggregates, assignment,
solution modifiers) along with the formal definitions of their semantics
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