Active integrity constraints have been introduced in the database community as a way to restore integrity based on a set of preferred update actions. We view active integrity constraints as dynamic logic programs and show how several semantics of database repair that were proposed in the literature can be characterised in Dynamic Logic of Propositional Assignments DL-PA . We moreover propose a new definition of repair which makes use of the programs of Dynamic Logic to provide repair solutions based on an iterating procedure. After an analysis of their properties and a comparison to the previous approaches, we provide complexity results for the problem of existence of these new repairs. Furthermore, an extension on databases with history is explored and the behavior of the various repairs is adjusted to work in this setting. For all these definitions we provide DL-PA counterparts of reasoning and decision problems, such as the existence of a repair or the existence of a unique repair.

Default conditionals are statements that express a condition of normality, in the form ‘if φ then normally ψ’ and are of primary importance in Knowledge Representation. There exist modal approaches to the construction of conditional logics of normality. Most of them are built on notions of preferen ce among possible worlds, corresponding to the semantic intuition that φ ⇒ ψ is true in a situation if in the most preferred (most ‘normal’) situations in which φ is true, ψ is also true. It has been noticed that there exist natural epistemic readings of a default conditional, but this direction has not been thoroughly explored. A statement of the form ‘something known to be a bird, that can be consistently believed to fly, does fly’ involves well-known epistemic attitudes and allows the possibility of defining defaults within the rich framework of Epistemic Logic. We pursue this direction here and proceed to define conditionals within KBE, a recently introduced S4.2-based modal logic of knowledge, belief and estimation. In this logic, knowledge is a normal S4 operator, belief is a normal KD45 operator and estimation is a non-normal operator interpreted as a ‘majority’ quantifier over the set of epistemically alternative situations. We define and explore various conditionals using the epistemic operators of KBE, capturing φ ⇒ ψ in various ways, including ‘according to the agent’s knowledge, an estimation that φ is true implies the estimation that (φ∧ψ) is true’ or ‘if φ is known and there is no reason to believe ¬ψ then ψ can be plausibly inferred’. Overall, we define here three nonmonotonic default conditionals, one conditional satisfying monotonicity (strengthening the antecedent) and two nonmonotonic conditionals that do not satisfy the ubiquitous axiom ID (reflexivity). Our project provides concrete evidence that the machinery of epistemic logic can be exploited for the study of default conditionals.