Inheritance in a Deductive Object Database Language with Updates

In this paper we introduce inheritance in deductive object databases and deene an operator for hierarchically composing deductive objects with state evolution capabilities. Evolution of such objects models the expected transactional behavior while preserving many important features of deductive databases. Deductive objects can be organized in ISA schemas where each object may inherit or redeene the rules deened in other objects. The resulting inheritance mechanism handles both the deductive and the update/transactional issues. Our framework accommodates several types of inheritance such as overriding, extension, and reenement. Besides presenting the language, this paper deenes its semantics and provides a description of the interpreter for the language that has been implemented.