Study on Database Programming Language for Advanced Use of IS-A Knowledge

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As the advance of hardware systems and their application technologies, database systems are requested to have highly advanced functionalities. As a result, it has become important to support the development of advanced application programs by combining the facilities of deductive databases, which provides a deduction mechanism based on a firm mathematical foundation, and those of object-oriented databases, which provides a flexible modeling capability of the real world. Based on this background, in this study, we focused on the application areas in which advanced knowledge processing capabilities such as natural language processing systems and expert systems are required.For these areas, we aimed at establishing a programming methodology to provide the capabilities of both advanced reasoning and flexible programming. More specifically, in order to combine the knowledge processing mechanism and the program execution mechanism in a highly flexible way, we examined each of these mechanism … More s closely and then tried to integrate them so as to satisfy the advanced applications' requirements.In our employed approach, we consider that the notion of inheritance plays a bridge across over the different two mechanisms, i.e., the inheritance reasoning is done in the knowledge processing mechanism and the result is reflected to program execution mechanism. In this approach, we can handle the knowledge processing part and the program execution part separately, while we can make use of both capabilities in an integrated way. As a result of our research in these two fiscal years, we have established the foundations of database programming language for advanced use of IS-A knowledge in three aspects : reasoning, programming, and application development. We feel convinced that the IS-A knowledge will play an important role in developing intellectual applications in the near future, and therefore our study of the last two years is considered to be very meaningful for such advanced applications. Less