DATA DICTIONARY DESIGN - A LOGIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

Some steps of the design of a data dictionary with the use of a particular methodology are represented by means of logic rules augumented with integrity constraints defining illegal data design. The presence of concepts incompatible among them is easily revealed by asking for satisfiability of integrity constraints. Furthermore, it is possible to obtain the hypotheses explaining the presence of illegality by exploiting abductive reasoning. To this end a new proposal for the computation of such hypotheses, based on an suitable manipulation of minimal three-valued models of the logic program, is presented