An Equational Constraint Logic approach to Conceptual Modelling

One relevant approach for developing advanced database and knowledge-based systems advocates the use of logic programming technology [17,28,30]. Recently, the logic programming paradigm has been generalized to the framework of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP), a generic scheme for the introduction of constraints in logic programming defined in [24, 25] and refined in [20]. In this framework, logic and equational programming have been integrated to define, as an instance of the scheme, a new declarative programming language, CLP(H/E), specialized in solving equations in equational theories [1, 2]. In this paper we present, using the experimental language CLP(H/E), equational constraint logic programming techniques as an effective tool to support database applications. These techniques are able to operate with running specifications in two useful modes, parsing mode and generating mode, as they are fitted in themselves with an inferential capability which can be used for plangeneration [28,33,41].