DECLARATIVE UPDATES IN DEDUCTIVE OBJECT BASES

Abstract

Updates are important database operations, but there has not yet been a uniform logical framework that accounts for them. This paper presents an approach to deal with updates in the deductive and object-oriented database setting. It incorporates temporal information into update rules, so that different versions of objects may be created at different time points and can be identified by the temporal information. The proposed update language has a simple and clear Herbrand-like declarative semantics, which can be computed by a bottom-up evaluation using a temporal stratification.