Efficient Handling of Context-Dependency in the Cached Event Calculus

This paper deals with the problem of providing temporal deductive databases with an efficient implementation in a logic programming framework. We restrict our attention to historical databases based on Kowalski and Sergot's Event Calculus extended with context-dependency. The paper aims at being beneficial to both the theoretically-minded and the implementation-oriented research communities. It provides a mathematical analysis of the computational complexity of query and update processing in the Event Calculus, and proposes a cached version of the calculus that moves computational complexity from query to update processing, and features an absolute improvement of performance when contextdependency is added. 1 Introduction The paper deals with the problem of providing temporal deductive databases (TDDs) with an efficient implementation in a logic programming framework. TDDs provide the possibility of managing temporal information not only to retrieve information as it was stored in th..