From Action Theories to Updates, Transactions, Triggers and Agents-A Tutorial

摘要

Actions are performed to change the state of the world. Action theories are formulations that allow the specification of and the reasoning about the effect an action, a sequence of actions, or a program or transaction consisting of actions,may have on the world Action theories also allow the specification of relationships between objects in the world, specifications of observations about occurrences of actions (called events) and reasoning with them. Although, a large body of research in action theories (Lif97, Geo94, Bro87) has focussed on AI aspects such as planning, actions are central to databases, particularly to DOODs, in the context of: (1) updates, (2) transactions, (3) triggers, and (4) agents and workflows. Exploring and elaborating on this is the aim of this tutorial. We now give a short overview on the ideas that we will be discussing during the tutorial talk.