InterBase-KB: integrating a knowledge base system with a multidatabase system for data warehousing

This paper describes the integration of a multidatabase system and a knowledge-base system to support the data-integration component of a data warehouse. The multidatabase system integrates various component databases with a common query language; however, it does not provide capability for schema integration and other utilities necessary for data warehousing. In addition, the knowledge base system offers a declarative logic language with second-order syntax but first-order semantics for integrating the schemes of the data sources into the warehouse and for defining complex, recursively defined materialized views. Furthermore, deductive rules are also used for cleaning, checking the integrity and summarizing the data imported into the data warehouse. The knowledge base system features an efficient incremental view maintenance mechanism that is used for refreshing the data warehouse, without querying the data sources.