APPLICATIONS OF HERACLITUS IN TELECOMMUNICATION INFORMATION-PROCESSING

In many telecommunications information processing applications it is u seful, and often necessary, to create and access multiple hypothetical states. These might correspond to future states reflecting pending up dates, or hypothetical alternative states that arise in the exploratio n of possible solutions. This paper shows how the Heraclitus family of database programming languages can be applied to satisfy such require ments. In the Heraclitus paradigm, database updates are captured as de ltas, which are syntactic objects that can be efficiently manipulated. Deltas can be used to represent pending or hypothetical updates. We a lso consider the issue of incorporating Heraclitus functionalities int o legacy telecommunication database systems.