Handbook of Automated Reasoning

6.6 Structured Objects, Well Foundedness, and Fixpoints

An alternative way to overcome the limitations that result from the restriction to unary and binary relationships, is to consider the interpretation domain as being constituted by objects with a complex structure, and extend the DLs with constructs that allow one to specify such structure [De Giacomo and Lenzerini 1995b]. This approach is in the spirit of object-oriented data models [Lecluse and Richard 1989, Bancilhon and Khoshafian 1989, Hull 1988, Bergamaschi and Nebel 1994]. In contrast with the idea of introducing n-any relations, all aspects of the domain to be modeled can be represented in a uniform way, namely as concepts whose instances have certain structures. In particular, ...