Epistemic Aspects of Databases
Marianne Winslett · 1995
Abstract This chapter explores the potential use of logic, and of the belief revision techniques of the preceding chapter, in databases and knowledge bases. In Section 1, we show how to formulate relational databases in first order logic, and discuss the use of logic in studying database queries, updates, incomplete information, and integrity constraints. Section 2 concentrates on the problem of updates to knowledge bases, a generalization of databases in which integrity constraints and incomplete information may combine to make updating very difficult. Section 3 shows how logic can be applied to the problems of diagnosing faults in circuits and of reasoning about the effects of actions.