Report Number: CS-TR-86-1096
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: A model-theoretic approach to updating logical databases
Author: Wilkins, Marianne Winslett
Date: January 1986
Abstract: We show that it is natural to extend the concept of database updates to encompass databases with incomplete information. Our approach embeds the incomplete database and the updates in the language of first-order logic, which we believe has strong advantages over relational tables and traditional data manipulation languages in the incomplete information situation. We present semantics for our update operators, and also provide an efficient algorithm to perform the operations.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/86/1096/CS-TR-86-1096.pdf