Generating Specialised Update Procedures Through Partial Deduction of the Ground Representation

摘要

Integrity constraints are very useful in many contexts, such as, for example, deductive databases, abductive and inductive logic programming. However, fully testing the integrity constraints after each update or modification can be very expensive and methods have been developed which simplify the integrity constraints. In this paper, we pursue the goal of writing this simplification procedure as a meta-program in logic programming and then using partial deduction to obtain specialised update procedures for certain update patterns. We argue that the ground representation has to be used to write this meta-program declaratively. However, contrary to what one might expect, current partial deduction techniques are then unable to specialise this meta-interpreter in an interesting way and no specialised update procedures can be obtained. We present a solution which uses a novel implementation of the ground representation and an improved partial deduction strategy. With this we are able to overcome the difficulties and produce highly specialised and efficient update procedures through partial deduction of meta-interpreters.