Online Computer Terms Dictionary - A

Aditi

<database, project> The Aditi Deductive Database System. A multi-user deductive database system from the Machine Intelligence Project at the University of Melbourne. It supports base relations defined by facts (relations in the sense of relational databases) and derived relations defined by rules that specify how to compute new information from old information.

Both base relations and the rules defining derived relations are stored on disk and are accessed as required during query evaluation. The rules defining derived relations are expressed in a Prolog-like language, which is also used for expressing queries.

Aditi supports the full structured data capability of Prolog. Base relations can store arbitrarily nested terms, for example arbitrary length lists, and rules can directly manipulate such terms. Base relations can be indexed with B-trees or multi-level signature files.

Users can access the system through a Motif-based query and database administration tool, or through a command line interface. There is also in interface that allows NU-Prolog programs to access Aditi in a transparent manner. Proper transaction processing is not supported in this release.

The beta release runs on SPARC/SunOS4.1.2 and MIPS/Irix4.0.

E-mail: <aditi@cs.mu.oz.au>.

(1992-12-17)