A formal language for writing data base integrity constraints

Population rules for most databases are currently written in free format English. This lack of standardization has produced population rules that are frequently ambiguous and lacking critical information. A new formal population rule language (PRL) has been designed to remove ambiguities from the population rules. PRL consists of a standard format template and a dependency section. The template describes all the information about the relation. The dependency section expresses intra- and interrelation constraints in a structured language. The authors describe the syntax and semantics of PRL