Transaction Logic

Transaction Logic  provides logical foundations for state changes and side effects in a logic programming language. A significant portion of this theory is implemented in Flora-2. Applications of Transaction Logic include modeling and reasoning about workflows, planning, robotics, view maintenance in databases, and more. Some works describing these applications can be found here.

• Transaction Logic. This is the most comprehensive report that describes this logic.
• A Logic for Programming Database Transactions in Logics for Databases and Information Systems, J. Chomicki and G. Saake (eds.), Kluwer Academic Publ., 1998.
  This is an introduction to Transaction Logic, much shorter than the above report with a focus on database applications.
• Results on Reasoning about Updates in Transaction Logic in Transactions and Change in Logic Databases, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1472, Springer Verlag, 1998.
• Transaction Logic with Partially Defined Actions. Journal on Data Semantics, August 2012, vol. 1, no. 2, Springer.
• Tabling for Transaction Logic . In Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of declarative programming (PPDP), July 2010.
• Transaction Logic with Defaults and Argumentation Theories. 27th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'11), July 2011.
• Concurrent Transaction Logic . Joint Intl. Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, Bonn, Germany, September 1996.
  This is an extension of Transaction Logic, which allows parallelism in the execution of complex actions. This extension is not implemented in Flora-2, but an independent implementation can be found here. One important use of Concurrent Transaction Logic is in modeling and verification of workflows (Intl. ACM Conference on Principles of Database Systems, 1998).
• CTR-S: A Logic for Specifying Contracts in Semantic Web Services Proceedings of the 13-th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2004), May 2004.
• Transaction Logic with Partially Defined Actions. Journal on Data Semantics, Springer, vol. 1:2 (2012), pp. 99-131.
• Earlier papers:
• Transaction Logic Programming, International Conference on Logic Programming, 1993.
  This is the original paper on Transaction Logic. In 2013, it has won the 20-year Test of Time award from the Association for Logic Programming for the most influential paper from the ICLP 1993 conference in the 20 years since. Talk presented at the acceptance of this award.
• An Overview of Transaction Logic, Theoretical Computer Science, 133:2, 1994.
• Database Programming in Transaction Logic. Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Database Programming Languages - Object Models and Languages, 1993.

An optimized interpreter for Transaction Logic along with a performance evaluation suite can be downloaded here.