Access to Objects by Path Expressions and Rules

Object oriented databases provide rich structuring capabilities to organize the objects being relevant for a given application. Due to the possible complexity of object structures, path expressions have become accepted as a concise syntactical means to reference objects. Even though known approaches to path expressions provide quite elegant access to objects, there seems to be still a need to extend the applicability of path expressions. The rule-language PathLog proposed in the current paper generalizes path expressions in several ways. PathLog adds a second dimension to path expressions which makes it possible to use only one path in situations where known one-dimensional path expressions require a conjunction of several paths. In addition, a path expression can also be used to reference virtual objects. This general use of path expressions gives rise to many interesting semantic implications.