Applying transition rules to bitemporal deductive databases for integrity constraint checking

Abstract

A bitemporal deductive database is a deductive database that supports valid and transaction time. A set of facts to be inserted and/or deleted in a bitemporal deductive database can be done in a past, present or future valid time. This circumstance causes that the maintenance of database consistency becomes more hard. In this paper, we present a new approach to reduce the difficulty of this problem, based on applying transition and event rules, which explicitly define the insertions and deletions given by a database update. Transition rules range over all the possible cases in which an update could violate some integrity contraint. Although, we have a large amount of transition rules, for each one we argue its utility or we eliminate it. We augment a database with this set of transition and event rules and then standard SLDNF resolution can be used to check satisfaction of integrity constraints.