The Research And Implementation Of Prolog Data Persistence Based On File System

In the development of information systems, the ability to handle massive data is one of the basic requirements where the basic way is data persistence.Prolog is nowadays one of the most influential artificial intelligence languages, which is very suitable for expression of human thought and reasoning rules and has been widely used in the natural language understanding, machine theorem proving, expert system, etc. In Prolog, data is mainly stored as facts in memory and obviously this approach cannot meet the need of the growth and permanent preservation of data. Therefore, the study of Prolog data persistence is significant.In recent years, some progresses have been made in the study of Prolog data persistence, such as odbc-interface in SWI Prolog, data persistent module based on MySQL in Ciao Prolog, and so on. These approaches are based on third-party relational database management system, wherein data access is through specific database interface with high complexity of the system and maintenance costs and low system efficiency.Based on study of the existing file storage techniques, this paper proposes a persistent model of file system for Prolog data, designs and implements a Persistent Fact Module(PFM) to carry out Prolog data persistence. The outlines of this paper include:1. Research and analysis of existing Prolog data persistence techniques based on relational data systems with the inclusion that such approaches have low efficiency than ones based on file system.2. Proposal of Prolog data persistence model based on file system. By layered design the model is divided into, from bottom to top, the data persistence and the external predicates layers.3. Design and implementation of the data persistence layer by using B+ tree algorithm that is most widely used in rational database management systems.4. Implementation of the external predicates layer through external language interface of SWI-Prolog and programming in C language.5. Application of the PFM system to the university student information management system, indicating that with the same overall efficiency, PFM successful reduces the data persistence complexity.