Data mining discovers knowledge and useful information from large amounts of data stored in databases. With the increasing popularity of object-oriented database system in advanced database applications, it is significantly important to study the data mining methods for object-oriented database. This paper proposes that higher-order logic programming languages and techniques is very suitable for object-oriented data mining, and presents a framework for object-oriented data mining based on higher-order logic programming. Such a framework is inductive logic programming which adopts higher-order logic programming language Escher as knowledge representation formalism. In addition, Escher is a generalization of the attribute-value representation, thus many higher-order logic learners under this framework can be upgraded directly from corresponding propositional learners.
Issues in the design of object-oriented database programming languages
