Book Reviews EXPERT DATABASE SYSTEMS Proceedings from the 2nd Intl. Conference April 25-27, 1988 Vienna, VA Editor L a r r y Kerschberg George Mason University Published by T h e B e n j a m i n / C u m m i n g s Publishing Company, Inc. I S B N 0-8053-0311-1 778 Pages Reviewer Faisel Saeed C o m p u t e r Science D e p a r t m e n t O k l a h o m a State University Expert Database Systems (EDS) has emerged in the recent years as a powerful combination of disciplines like Artificial Intelligence, Database Management, Logic Programming, and Fuzzy System Theory. This new field incorporates the benefits of both data-based and knowledge-based systems and has generated a great interest among the research, industrial and government communities. An International Workshop on EDS was held in South Carolina in October, 1984, which became the initiative for starting a series of International Conferences on EDS. The first conference on EDS was held in April, 1986 in South Carolina. The second conference, EDS'88, was held in Virginia on April 25-27, 1988. This conference was attended by 350 participants from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, England, Federal Republic of Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, the Soviet Union, Switzerland, and USA. The present volume is the proceedings of the Second International conference on EDS. It is divided into the following eleven parts: Part I: Keynote Address entitled "Future Trends in Expert Database Systems" by Prof. Michael Stonebraker, Univ. of California at Berkeley. This paper discusses various loosely and tightly coupled architectures and suggests a new architecture for EDS using the PORTGRES rule system. Part II: Panel Reports: Three panel discussions were conducted to explore the future-oriented issues which need to be addressed while creating the environment and software for future expert database management. The three panel reports are:1. "Constraint-Based Systems: Knowledge about Data" The panel was chaired by Mathew Morgenstern. 2. "Future Artificial Intelligence requirements" This session was chaired by Michael L. Brodie. 3. "Knowledge Management" The session was chaired by Adrian Walker. Part III through XI contain 27 papers on various topics such as: Object-Oriented Systems: Deals with the uses of abstract objects as templates for database queries on complex objects along with models and interfaces. An object-oriented browser, KIVIEW, and the Melecule-Atom Data model (MAD) are discussed as tools for navigation and manipulation of knowledge/data bases. Constraint Management: Different approaches towards constraint specification and enforcement are discussed. Expert Database System Architectures: Discusses the linking of inference processes with the relational databases. Two special features of this section are BERMUDA, which interfaces Prolog inferencing to a relational database machine, and another paper combining top-down and bottom-up computation techniques. Knowledge/Data System Architectures: Several paradigms combining Artificial Intelligence and Database Management are discussed. Recursive Query Processing: Three different algorithms to handle recursive queries, based on centralized iteration, transitive closure of database relations, and indexing, are presented. Learning and Adaptation in Expert Databases: A new data model, the Personal Knowledge Manager (PKM) which can learn and evolve the conceptual schema is presented in this section. Also another paper discusses different techniques on improving information transfer when responding to a user query. Knowledge Management in deductive Databases: Discusses the "deep compilation" of large rule bases, knowledge representation by means of equivalence relations, and checking integrity constraints using a rule/ graph approach. Intelligent Database Interfaces: Examines different ways to provide intelligent interfaces to databases. One of the papers presents a graph-oriented facility that allows the specification of recursive queries against both conventional and hypertext databases. Semantic Query Optimization: Deals with the use of knowledge, i.e., semantics associated with the database either in the form of rules or integrity constraints. The format of the volume is like traditional conference proceedings and the style diffe~ greatly in different papers. Especially in some papers, the references are numbered as [12] wlaereas in some other paper they appear as [WE72]. It could have been improved if a standard format, like the ACM format for technical papers, or the Publication Manual of the American Psycbological Association, was followed. S I G A R T Bulletin Vol. 1, No. 2

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