Abstract

Integrity constraints are rules which should guarantee the integrity of a database. Provided that an adequate mechanism to express them is available, the following question arises: is there any way to populate a database which satisfies the constraints supplied by a database designer? i.e., does the database schema, including constraints, admit at least a non--empty model? This work gives an answer to the above question in a complex object database environment, providing a theoretical framework including the following ingredients: two alternative formalisms, able to express a relevant set of state integrity constraints with a declarative style; two specialized reasoners, based on the tableaux calculus, able to check the consistency of complex objects database schemata expressed with the two formalisms. The proposed formalisms share a common kernel, which supports complex objects and object identifiers, and allow the expression of acyclic descriptions of: classes, nested relati...

Citations