PROLOG/RDBMS Integration in the NED Intelligent Information System

Abstract

Abstract. The following paper describes recent work on NED-2, an intelligent information system for ecosystem management currently in development by the USDA Forest Service. Using knowledge bases created by forestry experts and inference engines, NED-2 evaluates forest inventories according to a set of predefined goals. By integrating third-party simulation and visualization packages, NED-2 allows the user to plan, predict, and assess forest treatment scenarios. NED-2 is a blackboard system featuring agents implemented in PROLOG. Inventory, data calculation, and forest management plan creation modules are implemented in C++. The primary storage medium of NED-2 is a set of relational databases. The present paper focuses upon an issue of central importance to the project: the integration of PROLOG and relational databases to form the blackboard of NED-2.

Integrating Datalog and Constraint Solving

“…It is clear that this method is very inefficient, since it does not exploit any of the optimizations from the DBMS. Maier et al [6,7] have stressed the importance of achieving this coupling efficiently. A more recent approach thus translates Prolog database access predicates into appropriate SQL queries [8].…”

“…They estimated this requires no more work than extending either with some facilities of the other [9]. Unfortunately, to date, no full integration of Prolog and relational databases has gained a significant degree of acceptance [6]. Datalog, on the other hand, has been successfully used as a more integrated approach.…”