VI_SDB: a convivial approach for description and manipulation of deductive and stratified databases

Although deductive databases is based on a well established formalism, they didn't know the expected success. Their use was limited to the academic purpose. Indeed, the deductive database management systems are judged abstract, rare in commercial offers, and often expensive. In among the abstract concepts of the deductive databases, we mention the case of the negation and its treatment by the stratification. In this paper, we propose a convivial approach that aims to make transparent theses concepts relatively abstracted and to permit a friendly usse of deductive databases and stratified database. This approach permits to simplify concepts, which always remain delicate for this type of databases users or designers, like (1) the definition of a deductive and/or stratified database (2) the study of the stratifiability, (3) the determination of the maximal stratification, (4) the incremental definition of strata and (5) the checking of integrity constraints. These operations become more delicate if the database is voluminous. The proposed system supports rules update and is not limited to facts updating as in known deductive systems. This approach is implemented and validated with VI_SDB tool based on an extension of predicates nets.