Enriching Active Databases with Agent Technology

Intelligent agents are software components with a largely autonomous behaviour, that are fitted out with a considerable degree of artificial intelligence. They are a promising paradigm to serve as a foundation for future computing environments in general, and information systems in particular. At the same time database research has seen the rise of active databases, database systems that add autonomous behaviour to a database. In this paper, we investigate the addition of notions from intelligent agents to an active database. We explain why active databases already implement weak agency, and look into the benefits stronger agency can bring to an active database. It turns out that these are mainly found in the increased flexibility facilitated by the reasoning abilities strong agency implies. For example, an agent can have multiple strategies to maintain a constraint instead of a one fixed strategy defined by triggers.