A Framework for Cooperative Deductive Database Systems

In this paper, we address one important aspect of the problem of designing a cooperative deductive database system, namely, allocation of rules across the deductive database systems. We identify communication cost as the primary consideration in allocation of rules. The problem of optimal allocation of rules has been shown NP-complete, which has prohibitive execution times for large knowledge bases. We propose a naive algorithm for rule allocation and study its performance experimentally. We also address the problems of design, management, and integration of deductive database systems in a loosely coupled architecture, which constitute a cooperative deductive database system.