Declarative reconstruction of update in logic databases: a compilative approach

Deductive database languages exhibit an evident dychotomy in the way they support queries and transactions. Query answering is based on procedural semantics and fixpoint based (bottom-up) evaluation. Transactions are based procedural semantics and top-down evaluation, as for instance in the logic database language LDL [NT88]. This paper presents a technique to compile updates on standard to be evaluated with the usual bottom up evaluation mechanism. The compilation is based on the concept of XY-stratification [AOZ93, AOTZ93] which is a syntactic property of non-monotonic recursive programs. XY-stratified programs use stage arguments to integrate control on state transition within the deduction process