1 Active Behaviour in Deductive Databases 30 March 1996

This paper reports work in progress on active and deductive databases. Active rules are used for a variety of purposes, prominent amongst which are integrity enforcement, view maintenance and actions output to the environment. In this paper we argue that a package of deductive databases, temporal reasoning, integrity enforcement and abduction captures and possibly extends the first two main uses of active rules. As a by-product, we obtain a declarative, logical semantics for active rules. We propose embedding this package within an execution model, on the lines of recent proposals for formalisation of reactive agents, to capture the third main use of active rules.