DEVICE: Compiling production rules into event-driven rules using complex events

This paper describes a technique for the smooth integration of production rules into an active Object-Oriented Database (OODB) system that provides Event-Condition-Action (EGA) rules only, called DEVICE. The emphasis is given on the compilation of rule conditions into a discrimination network for incremental matching at run-time. The network consists of primitive, logical and complex events that save information about partial condition element matching, as in RETE algorithm, and trigger one ECA rule that corresponds to the production rule. The DEVICE method re-uses the primitives of active OODB systems, without introducing low-level data structures and provides an infrastructure for the integration of all database rule paradigms into a single knowledge base system. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.