A Denotational Semantics for the Starburst Production Rule Language

Abstract

Researchers often complain that the behavior of database production rules is diffcult to reason about and understand, due in part to the lack of formal declarative semantics. It has even been claimed that database production rule languages inherently cannot be given declarative semantics, in contrast to, e.g., deductive database rule languages. In this short paper we dispute this claim by giving a denotational semantics for the Starburst database production rule language.