Active Integrity Constraints Research Articles

Stratification in Approximation Fixpoint Theory and Its Application to Active Integrity Constraints

Approximation fixpoint theory (AFT) is an algebraic study of fixpoints of lattice operators that unifies various knowledge representation formalisms. In AFT, stratification of operators has been studied, essentially resulting in a theory that specifies when certain types of fixpoints can be computed stratum per stratum. Recently, novel types of fixpoints related to groundedness have been introduced in AFT. In this article, we study how those fixpoints behave under stratified operators. One recent application domain of AFT is the field of active integrity constraints (AICs). We apply our extended stratification theory to AICs and find that existing notions of stratification in AICs are covered by this general algebraic definition of stratification. As a result, we obtain stratification results for a large variety of semantics for AICs.

Existential active integrity constraints

Active integrity constraints (AICs) are a useful formalism to express integrity constraints and policies to restore consistency in databases violating them. However, AICs do not allow users to express different kinds of constraints commonly arising in practice, such as foreign keys.In this paper, we propose existential active integrity constraints (EAICs), a powerful extension of AICs that allows us to express a wide range of constraints used in databases and ontological systems. We investigate different properties of EAICs. Specifically, we show that there exists a “representative” set of founded updates, called universal, which suffices for query answering. As such a set might contain an infinite number of founded updates, each of infinite size, we study syntactic restrictions ensuring finiteness, as well as the existence of a single universal founded update.

A Dynamic Logic Account of Active Integrity Constraints

Active integrity constraints have been introduced in the database community as a way to restore integrity based on a set of preferred update actions. We view active integrity constraints as dynamic logic programs and show how several semantics of database repair that were proposed in the literature can be characterised in Dynamic Logic of Propositional Assignments DL-PA. We moreover propose a new definition of repair which makes use of the programs of Dynamic Logic to provide repair solutions based on an iterating procedure. After an analysis of their properties and a comparison to the previous approaches, we provide complexity results for the problem of existence of these new repairs. Furthermore, an extension on databases with history is explored and the behavior of the various repairs is adjusted to work in this setting. For all these definitions we provide DL-PA counterparts of reasoning and decision problems, such as the existence of a repair or the existence of a unique repair.

Active integrity constraints for general-purpose knowledge bases

In the database world, integrity constraints are essential to guarantee database integrity. The related problem of database repair deals with finding the best way to change a database so that it satisfies its integrity constraints. These two topics have been studied intensively since the 1980s. The formalism of active integrity constraints, proposed in 2004, aims at addressing them jointly, by providing a syntax whereby a particular subclass of integrity constraints can be specified together with preferred ways to repair inconsistency. In the last decade, several authors have proposed adaptations of the notion of integrity constraints to other reasoning frameworks than relational databases. In this article, we extend this line of work in two ways. First, we target multi-context systems, a general-purpose framework for combining heterogeneous reasoning systems, able to model most other reasoning frameworks, as we demonstrate. Second, we extend the notions of active integrity constraints and grounded repairs to this generalized setting. This way of including repair suggestions inside integrity constraints, subject to a validity check, enables us to define simple iterative algorithms to find all possible grounded repairs for an inconsistent multi-context system, avoiding the need to solve complex or undecidable problems.

Fixpoint semantics for active integrity constraints

Active integrity constraints (AICs) constitute a formalism to associate with a database not just the constraints it should adhere to, but also how to fix the database in case one or more of these constraints are violated. The intuitions regarding which repairs are “good” given such a description are closely related to intuitions that live in various areas of non-monotonic reasoning, such as logic programming and autoepistemic logic.In this paper, we apply approximation fixpoint theory, an abstract, algebraic framework designed to unify semantics of non-monotonic logics, to the field of AICs. This results in a new family of semantics for AICs. We study properties of our new semantics and relationships to existing semantics. In particular, we argue that two of the newly defined semantics stand out. Grounded repairs have a simple definition that is purely based on semantic principles that semantics for AICs should adhere to. And, as we show, they coincide with the intended interpretation of AICs on many examples. The second semantics of interest is the AFT-well-founded semantics: it is a computationally cheap semantics that provides upper and lower bounds for many other classes of repairs.

Active integrity constraints and revision programming

AbstractWe study active integrity constraints and revision programming, two formalisms designed to describe integrity constraints on databases and to specify policies on preferred ways to enforce them. Unlike other more commonly accepted approaches, these two formalisms attempt to provide a declarative solution to the problem. However, the original semantics of founded repairs for active integrity constraints and justified revisions for revision programs differ. Our main goal is to establish a comprehensive framework of semantics for active integrity constraints, to find a parallel framework for revision programs, and to relate the two. By doing so, we demonstrate that the two formalisms proposed independently of each other and based on different intuitions when viewed within a broader semantic framework turn out to be notational variants of each other. That lends support to the adequacy of the semantics we develop for each of the formalisms as the foundation for a declarative approach to the problem of database update and repair. In the paper, we also study computational properties of the semantics we consider and establish results concerned with the concept of the minimality of change and the invariance under the shifting transformation.

Active Integrity Constraints for Database Consistency Maintenance

This paper introduces active integrity constraints (AICs), an extension of integrity constraints for consistent database maintenance. An active integrity constraint is a special constraint whose body contains a conjunction of literals which must be false and whose head contains a disjunction of update actions representing actions (insertions and deletions of tuples) to be performed if the constraint is not satisfied (that is its body is true). The AICs work in a domino-like manner as the satisfaction of one AIC may trigger the violation and therefore the activation of another one. The paper also introduces founded repairs, which are minimal sets of update actions that make the database consistent, and are specified and ldquosupportedrdquo by active integrity constraints. The paper presents: 1) a formal declarative semantics allowing the computation of founded repairs and 2) a characterization of this semantics obtained by rewriting active integrity constraints into disjunctive logic rules, so that founded repairs can be derived from the answer sets of the derived logic program. Finally, the paper studies the computational complexity of computing founded repairs.