Integrity Constraints for General-Purpose Knowledge Bases

Integrity constraints in databases have been studied extensively since the 1980s, and they are considered essential to guarantee database integrity. In recent years, several authors have studied how the same notion can be adapted to reasoning frameworks, in such a way that they achieve the purpose of guaranteeing a system’s consistency, but are kept separate from the reasoning mechanisms. In this paper we focus on multi-context systems, a general-purpose framework for combining heterogeneous reasoning systems, enhancing them with a notion of integrity constraints that generalizes the corresponding concept in the database world.