Object orientation and logic programming for databases: A season's flirt or long-term marriage?

Abstract

A recent direction of database research has been focused on integrating logic programming and object orientation.The rationale of such integration stems from two arguments; on one hand, object-orientation brings powerful data modeling capabilities by adding semantic and structural complexity to value-based relational databases. On the other hand, logic programming languages provide means for expressing queries and updates on a database with a declarative style; further, they provide the ideal language paradigms for expressing constraints and integrity rules.The integration of these two worlds has been investigated theoretically; firm bases for the coexistence of value-based and identity-based concepts within a unique data model have been established, and novel features have been added to logic programming languages in order to give them full power on semantically enriched data models. Concurrent with the deepening of the theory, several prototypes are currently being designed and implemented; among them, the LOGRES system, that will be extensively described in this paper.Theory and prototypes give evidence of a “flirt” between object orientation and logic programming; this paper attempts a critical discussion of the area, thereby anticipating the possibility of a long-term marriage.KeywordsLogic ProgrammingDeductive DatabaseType ConstructorLogic Programming LanguageMultiple InheritanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.