41,597 research outputs found
Finite Open-World Query Answering with Number Restrictions (Extended Version)
Open-world query answering is the problem of deciding, given a set of facts,
conjunction of constraints, and query, whether the facts and constraints imply
the query. This amounts to reasoning over all instances that include the facts
and satisfy the constraints. We study finite open-world query answering (FQA),
which assumes that the underlying world is finite and thus only considers the
finite completions of the instance. The major known decidable cases of FQA
derive from the following: the guarded fragment of first-order logic, which can
express referential constraints (data in one place points to data in another)
but cannot express number restrictions such as functional dependencies; and the
guarded fragment with number restrictions but on a signature of arity only two.
In this paper, we give the first decidability results for FQA that combine both
referential constraints and number restrictions for arbitrary signatures: we
show that, for unary inclusion dependencies and functional dependencies, the
finiteness assumption of FQA can be lifted up to taking the finite implication
closure of the dependencies. Our result relies on new techniques to construct
finite universal models of such constraints, for any bound on the maximal query
size.Comment: 59 pages. To appear in LICS 2015. Extended version including proof
The data-exchange chase under the microscope
In this paper we take closer look at recent developments for the chase
procedure, and provide additional results. Our analysis allows us create a
taxonomy of the chase variations and the properties they satisfy. Two of the
most central problems regarding the chase is termination, and discovery of
restricted classes of sets of dependencies that guarantee termination of the
chase. The search for the restricted classes has been motivated by a fairly
recent result that shows that it is undecidable to determine whether the chase
with a given dependency set will terminate on a given instance. There is a
small dissonance here, since the quest has been for classes of sets of
dependencies guaranteeing termination of the chase on all instances, even
though the latter problem was not known to be undecidable. We resolve the
dissonance in this paper by showing that determining whether the chase with a
given set of dependencies terminates on all instances is coRE-complete. For the
hardness proof we use a reduction from word rewriting systems, thereby also
showing the close connection between the chase and word rewriting. The same
reduction also gives us the aforementioned instance-dependent RE-completeness
result as a byproduct. For one of the restricted classes guaranteeing
termination on all instances, the stratified sets dependencies, we provide new
complexity results for the problem of testing whether a given set of
dependencies belongs to it. These results rectify some previous claims that
have occurred in the literature.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1303.668
Composition with Target Constraints
It is known that the composition of schema mappings, each specified by
source-to-target tgds (st-tgds), can be specified by a second-order tgd (SO
tgd). We consider the question of what happens when target constraints are
allowed. Specifically, we consider the question of specifying the composition
of standard schema mappings (those specified by st-tgds, target egds, and a
weakly acyclic set of target tgds). We show that SO tgds, even with the
assistance of arbitrary source constraints and target constraints, cannot
specify in general the composition of two standard schema mappings. Therefore,
we introduce source-to-target second-order dependencies (st-SO dependencies),
which are similar to SO tgds, but allow equations in the conclusion. We show
that st-SO dependencies (along with target egds and target tgds) are sufficient
to express the composition of every finite sequence of standard schema
mappings, and further, every st-SO dependency specifies such a composition. In
addition to this expressive power, we show that st-SO dependencies enjoy other
desirable properties. In particular, they have a polynomial-time chase that
generates a universal solution. This universal solution can be used to find the
certain answers to unions of conjunctive queries in polynomial time. It is easy
to show that the composition of an arbitrary number of standard schema mappings
is equivalent to the composition of only two standard schema mappings. We show
that surprisingly, the analogous result holds also for schema mappings
specified by just st-tgds (no target constraints). This is proven by showing
that every SO tgd is equivalent to an unnested SO tgd (one where there is no
nesting of function symbols). Similarly, we prove unnesting results for st-SO
dependencies, with the same types of consequences.Comment: This paper is an extended version of: M. Arenas, R. Fagin, and A.
Nash. Composition with Target Constraints. In 13th International Conference
on Database Theory (ICDT), pages 129-142, 201
Exchange-Repairs: Managing Inconsistency in Data Exchange
In a data exchange setting with target constraints, it is often the case that
a given source instance has no solutions. In such cases, the semantics of
target queries trivialize. The aim of this paper is to introduce and explore a
new framework that gives meaningful semantics in such cases by using the notion
of exchange-repairs. Informally, an exchange-repair of a source instance is
another source instance that differs minimally from the first, but has a
solution. Exchange-repairs give rise to a natural notion of exchange-repair
certain answers (XR-certain answers) for target queries. We show that for
schema mappings specified by source-to-target GAV dependencies and target
equality-generating dependencies (egds), the XR-certain answers of a target
conjunctive query can be rewritten as the consistent answers (in the sense of
standard database repairs) of a union of conjunctive queries over the source
schema with respect to a set of egds over the source schema, making it possible
to use a consistent query-answering system to compute XR-certain answers in
data exchange. We then examine the general case of schema mappings specified by
source-to-target GLAV constraints, a weakly acyclic set of target tgds and a
set of target egds. The main result asserts that, for such settings, the
XR-certain answers of conjunctive queries can be rewritten as the certain
answers of a union of conjunctive queries with respect to the stable models of
a disjunctive logic program over a suitable expansion of the source schema.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, submitted to the Journal on Data Semantic
Answer Sets for Consistent Query Answering in Inconsistent Databases
A relational database is inconsistent if it does not satisfy a given set of
integrity constraints. Nevertheless, it is likely that most of the data in it
is consistent with the constraints. In this paper we apply logic programming
based on answer sets to the problem of retrieving consistent information from a
possibly inconsistent database. Since consistent information persists from the
original database to every of its minimal repairs, the approach is based on a
specification of database repairs using disjunctive logic programs with
exceptions, whose answer set semantics can be represented and computed by
systems that implement stable model semantics. These programs allow us to
declare persistence by defaults and repairing changes by exceptions. We
concentrate mainly on logic programs for binary integrity constraints, among
which we find most of the integrity constraints found in practice.Comment: 34 page
- …