Deductive Databases with Universally Quantified Conditions

This paper presents an extension to deductive databases, called quantified deductive databases, that incorporates universally quantified expressions (in coded form) in the body of rules. Since universally quantified expressions contain negations in their semantics, quantified deductive databases fall under the category of deductive databases with negation. Furthermore, depending on other factors such as recursion and negation in body of rules, quantified deductive databases may be classified as stratified or non-stratified deductive databases. Applications of quantified deductive databases in expressing relational queries as well as in the bottom-up computation of the (weak) well-founded model of general deductive databases are presented. It is conjectured that quantified deductive databases includes the class of modularly stratified deductive databases.