Structural Semantics Management: an Application of the Chase in Networking.

The value of database in advancing networking - in the paradigm shift from protocols to software-defined networking - was once highlighted by database-inspired management of network states. Moving beyond factual states, this paper considers semantics management a new frontier in the databases-networking knowledge “transfer”, seeking to manage network policies via structural manipulation of the corresponding software (program). As a proof of concept, we make a case of semantics-based network transformation with the datalog structure and the chase, an elegant process for handling data dependencies (semantics). Our main result is an extension of the classic chase to faure-log; a networking extension of datalog for the richer networking policies.