Tracking Causal Dependencies in an Active Object-Oriented Database

As active and deductive databases are applied to more complex domains (e.g. engineering design), the need to track the causality of data which has been derived by rules in the database becomes vital. Truth maintenance systems have been used in the area of artificial intelligence to track the causal dependencies of data derived from rules in knowledge-based systems. These same techniques can be applied to active object-oriented databases to provide the users with the means to track the relationships between data and rules. This paper describes the relevant features of a simple truth maintenance systems and puts forth a model of how truth maintenance systems can be integrated with an active object-oriented database, including the definition of new query operators to interpret the causal information for the end user.

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