Results on Reasoning about Updates in Transaction Logic

Transaction Logic was designed as a general logic of state change for deductive databases and logic programs. It has a model theory, a proof theory, and its Horn subset can be given a procedural interpretation. Previous work has demonstrated that the combination of declarative semantics and procedural interpretation turns the Horn subset of Transaction Logic into a powerful language for logic programming with updates [BK98,BK94,BK93,BK95]. In this paper, we focus not on the Horn subset, but on the full logic, and we explore its potential as a formalism for reasoning about logic programs with updates. We rst develop a methodology for specifying properties of such programs, and then provide a sound inference system for reasoning about them, and conjecture a completeness result. Finally, we illustrate the power of the inference system through a series of examples of increasing di culty.