Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Syllog, a Knowledge Based Data Management System
Yet, substantial progress is being made in bringing techniques from logic into the realm of practical computation. In the programming language prolog a program is a set of ordered sequences of logical clauses. A clause can be a simple ground (variable-free) assertion, which can be regarded as a row in a relation in a data base, or it can be a conjunction of predicates containing variables which implies a conclusion predicate, in which case it can be regarded as a production rule. 80, for small data bases, prolog contains the means to store data, and to make deductions about the data using production rules.
There are two drawbacks to using prolog directly for a practical data base system. First, prolog notation, though natural for computer scientists, is probably difficult for most non-specialists to use. For example, an otherwise correct retrieval program, in which the order of two clauses is reversed, can enter an infinite loop. Second, the execution mechanism in current implementations is a depth first backtrack search over internal (or virtual) storage; the problem of efficiently searching external (e.g. Disk) storage has yet to be addressed.
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