Abstract

The maintenance of semantic integrity has been recognized as a cornerstone issue for the development of databases and knowledge bases alike. Despite the extensive research conducted during the last two decades, semantic integrity maintenance has yet to become a practical technology. Furthermore, the need for modeling evolving domains has given rise to challenging research issues relating to the incorporation of time in knowledge bases. In this thesis, we study the problem of maintaining the integrity of temporal deductive knowledge bases. We argue that existing approaches in either temporal or deductive databases do not address the problem in a satisfactory manner, nor do they deal with all the issues involved in a unified framework. At first, we propose an assertion language that permits us to express different types of temporal assertions that are not expressible in other formalisms. We define the notion of temporal constraint satisfaction in a bitemporal context. We then follow two ...

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