Abstract
The ramification and qualification problems are two infamous, hard and ever present problems in databases and, more generally, in systems exhibiting a dynamic behavior. The ramification problem refers to determining the indirect effects of actions, whereas the qualification problem refers to determining the preconditions which must hold prior to the execution of an action. A solution to these problems in database systems permits reasoning about the dynamics of databases and allows proving consistency properties. These two problems become increasingly complex in temporal databases and no satisfactory solution has been proposed as of yet. In this paper, we describe these two problems in the context of temporal databases and we propose a solution of polynomial complexity based on the language of the Situation Calculus. This solution extends previous proposals for the solution of these problems in conventional (non-temporal) databases.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
A. Borgida, J. Mylopoulos and R. Reiter. On the Frame Problem in Procedure Specifications. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering, 21(10), Oct. 1995, pp.785–798.
C. Elkan. Reasoning about action in first order logic. In Proceedings of the Conference of the Canadian Society for Comptutational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI), pages 221–227, Vancouver, Canada, May 1992.
M. Ginsberg and D. Smith. Reasoning about action I: A possible worlds approach. Artificial Intelligence, 35:165–195, 1988.
M. Ginsberg and D. Smith. Reasoning about action II: A possible worlds approach. Artificial Intelligence, 35:311–342, 1988.
J. Gustafon. Extending Temporal Action Logic for Ramification and Concurency, Thesis No 719 of Linkoping Studies in Science and Technology, 1998.
R. Fikes and N. J. Nilsson, STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2:189–208, 1971.
A. Fusaoka. Situation Calculus on a Dense Flow of Time. Proceedings of the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 633–638, 1996
A. Haas. The Case for Domain-Specific Frame Axioms. In F. Brown, editor. The frame problem in artificial intelligence. Proceedings of the 1987 workshop, pages 343–348, 1987.
V. Lifshitz. Towards a metatheory of action. In J.F. Allen, R. Fikes, and E. Sandewall, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pages 376–386, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
V. Lifshitz. Frames in the space of situations, Artificial Intelligence, 46:365–376, 1990.
V. Lifshitz. Restricted monotonicity. In Proceedings of the AAAI National Conference on Artifical Intelligence, pages 432–437, Washington DC, July 1993.
N. McCain and Hudson Turner. A causal theory of ramifications and qualifications. In C. S. Mellish, editor, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligence (IJCAI), pages 1978–1984, Montreal, Canada, August 1995.
J. McCarthy and P.J. Hayes. Some philophical problem from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. In B. Meltzer and D. Mitchie, editors, Machine Intelligence 4, pages 463–502. American Elsevier, New York, 1969.
Nikos Papadakis and Dimitris Plexousakis. Action Theories in Temporal Databases. 8th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics. Nicosia, Cyprus 8–11 Nov 2001.
E. Pednault. ADL: Exploring the Middle Ground between STRIPS and the Situation Calculus. In R.J. Brachman, H. Levesque, and R. Reiter, editors, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR’ 89), pages 324–332. Morgan Kaufmann, 1989.
Dimitris Plexousakis, John Mylopoulos: Accomodating Integrity Constraints During Database Design. Proceedings of EDBT 1996, pages 497–513
J. Pinto. Temporal Reasoning in the Situation Calculus. Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Jan. 1994.
J. Pinto and R. Reiter. Temporal Reasoning in Logic Programming: A Case for the Situation Calculus. Proc. 10th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming, Budapest, Hungary, June 21–24, 1993.
R. Reiter A logic for default reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 13:81–132, 1980.
R. Reiter. Khowledge in Action: Logical Foundation for specifying and implemending Dynamical Systems, MIT Press, 2001.
M. Thielscher. Ramification and causality. Artifical Intelligence, 89(1–2):317–364, 1997.
M. Thielscher. Reasoning about actions: Steady versus stabilizing state constraints. Artifical Intelligence, 104:339–355, 1988.
M. Thielscher.Nondeterministic actions in the fluent calculus: Disjunctive state update axioms. In S. Holldobler, editor, Intellectics and Computational Logic. Kluwer, 1999.
M. Thielscher. Qualified ramifications. In B. Kuipers and B. Wbber, editors, Proceedings of the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 466–471, 1997
M. Winslett. Reasoning about action using a possible models approach. In Proceeding of the AAAI National Conference on Artifical Intelligence, pages 89–93, Saint Paul, MN, August 1988.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Papadakis, N., Plexousakis, D. (2002). The Ramification and Qualification Problems in Temporal Databases. In: Vlahavas, I.P., Spyropoulos, C.D. (eds) Methods and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. SETN 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2308. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46014-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46014-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43472-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46014-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive