An Active Functional Intensional Database

Abstract

We introduce a new kind of functional database that unifies concepts from the realms of publish-subscribe middleware, pervasive computing, and intensional programming. The AFID (Active Functional Intensional Database) Project allows the distribution of both pervasive context and related, versioned content, and offers the means of effecting a client’s interaction with both. The AFID data model builds on existing infrastructure from the Intense project for the efficient manipulation and networked distribution of intensional context, adding the ability to encode multiple versions of any complex entity, where each version may vary in both content and structure, at any level of granularity. Further, the system ensures that clients may listen to structured, minimal changes in specific logical versions of encoded entities, as they occur, whenever any change is made to the total entity encoded in the database.