Queries with Guarded Negation (full version)

A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL, called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation, called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness. GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog, and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark workloads shows that most usage of negation in SQL in practice is guarded negation

Guarded Teams: The Horizontally Guarded Case

Team semantics admits reasoning about large sets of data, modelled by sets of assignments (called teams), with first-order syntax. This leads to high expressive power and complexity, particularly in the presence of atomic dependency properties for such data sets. It is therefore interesting to explore fragments and variants of logic with team semantics that permit model-theoretic tools and algorithmic methods to control this explosion in expressive power and complexity. We combine here the study of team semantics with the notion of guarded logics, which are well-understood in the case of classical Tarski semantics, and known to strike a good balance between expressive power and algorithmic manageability. In fact there are two strains of guardedness for teams. Horizontal guardedness requires the individual assignments of the team to be guarded in the usual sense of guarded logics. Vertical guardedness, on the other hand, posits an additional (or definable) hypergraph structure on relational structures in order to interpret a constraint on the component-wise variability of assignments within teams. In this paper we investigate the horizontally guarded case. We study horizontally guarded logics for teams and appropriate notions of guarded team bisimulation. In particular, we establish characterisation theorems that relate invariance under guarded team bisimulation with guarded team logics, but also with logics under classical Tarski semantics

Well-Founded Semantics for Extended Datalog and Ontological Reasoning

The Datalog± family of expressive extensions of Datalog has recently been introduced as a new paradigm for query answering over ontologies, which captures and extends several common description logics. It extends plain Datalog by features such as existentially quantified rule heads and, at the same time, restricts the rule syntax so as to achieve decidability and tractability. In this paper, we continue the research on Datalog±. More precisely, we generalize the well-founded semantics (WFS), as the standard semantics for nonmonotonic normal programs in the database context, to Datalog± programs with negation under the unique name assumption (UNA). We prove that for guarded Datalog± with negation under the standard WFS, answering normal Boolean conjunctive queries is decidable, and we provide precise complexity results for this problem, namely, in particular, completeness for PTIME (resp., 2-EXPTIME) in the data (resp., combined) complexity

Equality-friendly well-founded semantics and applications to description logics

We tackle the problem of defining a well-founded semantics (WFS) for Datalog rules with existentially quantified variables in their heads and nega- tions in their bodies. In particular, we provide a WFS for the recent Datalog± family of ontology languages, which covers several important description logics (DLs). To do so, we generalize Datalog± by non-stratified nonmonotonic nega- tion in rule bodies, and we define a WFS for this generalization via guarded fixed point logic. We refer to this approach as equality-friendly WFS, since it has the advantage that it does not make the unique name assumption (UNA); this brings it close to OWL and its profiles as well as typical DLs, which also do not make the UNA. We prove that for guarded Datalog± with negation under the equality- friendly WFS, conjunctive query answering is decidable, and we provide precise complexity results for this problem. From these results, we obtain precise defi- nitions of the standard WFS extensions of EL and of members of the DL-Lite family, as well as corresponding complexity results for query answering

Evaluating Datalog via Tree Automata and Cycluits

We investigate parameterizations of both database instances and queries that make query evaluation fixed-parameter tractable in combined complexity. We show that clique-frontier-guarded Datalog with stratified negation (CFG-Datalog) enjoys bilinear-time evaluation on structures of bounded treewidth for programs of bounded rule size. Such programs capture in particular conjunctive queries with simplicial decompositions of bounded width, guarded negation fragment queries of bounded CQ-rank, or two-way regular path queries. Our result is shown by translating to alternating two-way automata, whose semantics is defined via cyclic provenance circuits (cycluits) that can be tractably evaluated.Comment: 56 pages, 63 references. Journal version of "Combined Tractability of Query Evaluation via Tree Automata and Cycluits (Extended Version)" at arXiv:1612.04203. Up to the stylesheet, page/environment numbering, and possible minor publisher-induced changes, this is the exact content of the journal paper that will appear in Theory of Computing Systems. Update wrt version 1: latest reviewer feedbac

Deciding regular grammar logics with converse through first-order logic

We provide a simple translation of the satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse into GF2, which is the intersection of the guarded fragment and the 2-variable fragment of first-order logic. This translation is theoretically interesting because it translates modal logics with certain frame conditions into first-order logic, without explicitly expressing the frame conditions. A consequence of the translation is that the general satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse is in EXPTIME. This extends a previous result of the first author for grammar logics without converse. Using the same method, we show how some other modal logics can be naturally translated into GF2, including nominal tense logics and intuitionistic logic. In our view, the results in this paper show that the natural first-order fragment corresponding to regular grammar logics is simply GF2 without extra machinery such as fixed point-operators.Comment: 34 page

On the uniform one-dimensional fragment

The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic, U1, is a recently introduced formalism that extends two-variable logic in a natural way to contexts with relations of all arities. We survey properties of U1 and investigate its relationship to description logics designed to accommodate higher arity relations, with particular attention given to DLR_reg. We also define a description logic version of a variant of U1 and prove a range of new results concerning the expressivity of U1 and related logics