What Should A Database Know?

Summary: Argues for querying databases with Levesque's epistemic modal logic KFOPCE so queries can refer to facts and to what the database knows (K), enabling handling of nulls and known/unknown individuals. Recasts static integrity constraints and their satisfaction under epistemic semantics. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 839
Venue: PODS
Year: 1988
Pagerank: 5.3616554e-05
Overall Rank: 8,826 | 39.45%
DOI: 10.1145/308386.308462

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Raymond Reiter (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; University of Toronto)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{reiter_pods88,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '88},
        title = {{What Should A Database Know?}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/308386.308462},
        doi = {10.1145/308386.308462},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Reiter, Raymond},
        year = {1988}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,944	Hybrid Querying Over Relational Databases and Large Language Models	2025	CIDR	6.432467e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

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