Updating knowledge bases while maintaining their consistency

  • Authors:

  • Ernest Teniente;Antoni Olivé

  • Affiliations:

  • Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Facultat d'Informàtica, E-08028 Barcelona-Catalonia.;Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Facultat d'Informàtica, E-08028 Barcelona-Catalonia.

  • Venue:
  • The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases
  • Year:
  • 1995

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

When updating a knowledge base, several problems may arise. One of the most important problems is that of integrity constraints satisfaction. The classic approach to this problem has been to develop methods for checking whether a given update violates an integrity constraint. An alternative approach consists of trying to repair integrity constraints violations by performing additional updates that maintain knowledge base consistency. Another major problem in knowledge base updating is that of view updating, which determines how an update request should be translated into an update of the underlying base facts. We propose a new method for updating knowledge bases while maintaining their consistency. Our method can be used for both integrity constraints maintenance and view updating. It can also be combined with any integrity checking method for view updating and integrity checking. The kind of updates handled by our method are: updates of base facts, view updates, updates of deductive rules, and updates of integrity constraints. Our method is based on events and transition rules, which explicitly define the insertions and deletions induced by a knowledge base update. Using these rules, an extension of the SLDNF procedure allows us to obtain all possible minimal ways of updating a knowledge base without violating any integrity constraint.