Jinzan Lai - Dept. of computer Science and Software Engineering Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Cana
Nematollaah Shiri - Dept. of computer Science and Software Engineering Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Cana

Uncertainty reasoning has been identified as an important and challenging issue in the database research. Many logic frameworks have been proposed to represent and reason about uncertainty in deductive databases. On the basis of the way in which uncertainties are associated with the facts and rules in programs, the approaches of these frameworks have been classified into “annotation based (AB)” and “implication based (IB).” When extending both frameworks with certainty constraints, they become equivalent in terms of xpressive power. In this paper, we propose a uniform environment to evaluate and experiment with logic programs in AB and IB frameworks at the same time. We also extend the existing query processing to handle certainty constraints and we carry out experiments to evaluate its performance. Our experiments and results indicate that the proposed techniques yield tools that are capable to reason with uncertainty.

Uncertainty reasoning; Deductive databases, Certainty constraints, Fixpoint evaluation