External Transaction Logic : reasoning and executing transactions involving external domains 1

In this work we present External Transaction Logic, a logic that extends Transaction logic with the ability to model and execute transactions requiring interactions with external entities, as e.g. external web-source, web-services or agents. Transactions are defined in a logic programming style by the composition of internal and external primitives. These primitives are incorporated in a quite general manner, as a parameter of the External Transaction Logic theory, allowing the specification of transactions integrating knowledge and actions from multiple sources and semantics. Since one has different control over internal and external domains, different transaction properties are ensured depending on where actions are executed. Namely, internal actions executed in a knowledge base that we fully control, follow the standard ACID model of transactions. Contrarily, transactional properties over actions executed externally need to be relaxed, as it is impossible to rollback actions executed in a domain that is external. To deal with this, external actions can be defined along with compensating operations. If a transaction fails after executing some external action, then these compensations are executed in a backward order to achieve a relaxed model of atomicity. We provide a model theory for External Transaction Logic, that can be used to reason about the conditions of execution of transactions that require the issuing of both internal and external actions on abstract knowledge bases with potentially different state semantics. We also present here a corresponding proof theory (sound and complete w.r.t. the model theory) that provides means to execute such transactions in a top-down manner.