Deduction Trees and the View Update Problem in Indefinite Deductive Databases

The view update problem is concerned with indirectly modifying those tuples that satisfy a view (or derived table) by an appropriate update against the corresponding base tables. The notion of a deduction tree is defined, and the relationship between such trees and the view update problem for indefinite deductive databases is considered. It is shown that a traversal of an appropriate deduction tree yields sufficient information to perform view updates at the propositional level. To obtain a similar result at the first order level, it is necessary (for theoretical and computational reasons) to impose some weak stratification and definiteness constraints on the database.