Prof. Salvatore J. Stolfo

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
sal@cs.columbia.edu

Member of the Polytechnic University Center for Advanced Technology

Incremental Rule Processing

Our work on PARADISER/PARULEL also lead to the development of new and patented algorithms for general incremental rule processing over distributed database sites for a wide variety of rule language semantics. The intent of this work was to provide efficient updates to an ongoing inference process while the underlying database changed through "ordinary" transaction processing or other cohabitating applications.

Rather than restarting an inference computation from scratch, one would obviously prefer to simply update the computation as fast as possible. (Otherwise, one would find themselves in an infinite regression.) State saving techniques and casching are obviously required to accomplish the task. We developed these techniques with a reasonable cost in space using lightweight update processes (an obvious space/time tradeoff is apparent.) This work was done jointly with Ouri Wolfson who is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago.


Patents: Incremental Update Process and Apparatus for an Inference System, Issued Nov. 8, 1994, US Patent No. 5,363,473, assigned to Columbia University.
BACK