The intelligent database interface: integrating AI and database systems

Abstract

The Intelligent Database Interface (IDI) is a cache-based interface that is designed to provide Articial Intelligence systems with ecient access to one or more databases on one or more remote database management systems (DBMSs). It can be used to interface with a wide variety of dierent DBMSs with little or no modication since SQL is used to communicate with remote DBMSs and the implementation of the IDI provides a high degree of portability. The query language of the IDI is a restricted subset of function-free Horn clauses which is translated into SQL. Results from the IDI are returned one tuple at a time and the IDI manages a cache of result relations to improve eciency. The IDI is one of the key components of the Intelligent System Server (ISS) knowledge representation and reasoning system and is also being used to provide database services for the Unisys spoken language systems program.