Declarative Semantics of Production Rules for Integrity Maintenance

This paper presents a declarative semantics for the maintenance of integrity constraints expressed by means of production rules. A production rule is a special form of active rule, called active integrity constraint, whose body contains an integrity constraint (conjunction of literals which must be false) and whose head contains a disjunction of update atoms, i.e. actions to be performed if the corresponding constraint is not satisfied (i.e. is true). The paper introduces i) a formal declarative semantics allowing the computation of founded repairs, that is repairs whose actions are specified and supported by active integrity constraint, ii) an equivalent semantics obtained by rewriting production rules into disjunctive logic rules, so that repairs can be derived from the answer sets of the logic program and finally iii) a characterization of production rules allowing a methodology for integrity maintenance.