Incorporating Classical Logic Argumentation into Policy-based Inconsistency Management in Relational Databases

Inconsistency management policies allow a relational database user to express customized ways for managing inconsistency according to his need. For each functional dependency, a user has a library of applicable policies, each of them with constraints, requirements, and preferences for their application, that can contradict each other. The problem that we address in this work is that of determining a subset of these policies that are suitable for application w.r.t. the set of constraints and user preferences. We propose a classical logic argumentation-based solution, which is a natural approach given that integrity constraints in databases and data instances are, in general, expressed in first order logic (FOL). An automatic argumentation-based selection process allows to retain some of the characteristics of the kind of reasoning that a human would perform in this situation.