Foundations of Rule-Based Query Answering

This survey article introduces into the essential concepts and methods underlying rule-based query languages. It covers four complementary areas: declarative semantics based on adaptations of mathematical logic, operational semantics, complexity and expressive power, and optimisation of query evaluation. The treatment of these areas is foundation-oriented, the foundations having resulted from over four decades of research in the logic programming and database communities on combinations of query languages and rules. These results have later formed the basis for conceiving, improving, and implementing several Web and Semantic Web technologies, in particular query languages such as XQuery or SPARQL for querying relational, XML, and RDF data, and rule languages like the “Rule Interchange Framework (RIF)” currently being developed in a working group of the W3C. Coverage of the article is deliberately limited to declarative languages in a classical setting: issues such as query answering in F-Logic or in description logics, or the relationship of query answering to reactive rules and events, are not addressed

Games and Argumentation: Time for a Family Reunion!

The rule "defeated(X) $\leftarrow$ attacks(Y,X), $\neg$ defeated(Y)" states that an argument is defeated if it is attacked by an argument that is not defeated. The rule "win(X) $\leftarrow$ move(X,Y), $\neg$ win(Y)" states that in a game a position is won if there is a move to a position that is not won. Both logic rules can be seen as close relatives (even identical twins) and both rules have been at the center of attention at various times in different communities: The first rule lies at the core of argumentation frameworks and has spawned a large family of models and semantics of abstract argumentation. The second rule has played a key role in the quest to find the "right" semantics for logic programs with recursion through negation, and has given rise to the stable and well-founded semantics. Both semantics have been widely studied by the logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning community. The second rule has also received much attention by the database and finite model theory community, e.g., when studying the expressive power of query languages and fixpoint logics. Although close connections between argumentation frameworks, logic programming, and dialogue games have been known for a long time, the overlap and cross-fertilization between the communities appears to be smaller than one might expect. To this end, we recall some of the key results from database theory in which the win-move query has played a central role, e.g., on normal forms and expressive power of query languages. We introduce some notions that naturally emerge from games and that may provide new perspectives and research opportunities for argumentation frameworks. We discuss how solved query evaluation games reveal how- and why-not provenance of query answers. These techniques can be used to explain how results were derived via the given query, game, or argumentation framework.Comment: Fourth Workshop on Explainable Logic-Based Knowledge Representation (XLoKR), Sept 2, 2023. Rhodes, Greec

Expressiveness of Temporal Query Languages: On the Modelling of Intervals, Interval Relationships and States

Storing and retrieving time-related information are important, or even critical, tasks on many areas of Computer Science (CS) and in particular for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The expressive power of temporal databases/query languages has been studied from different perspectives, but the kind of temporal information they are able to store and retrieve is not always conveniently addressed. Here we assess a number of temporal query languages with respect to the modelling of time intervals, interval relationships and states, which can be thought of as the building blocks to represent and reason about a large and important class of historic information. To survey the facilities and issues which are particular to certain temporal query languages not only gives an idea about how useful they can be in particular contexts, but also gives an interesting insight in how these issues are, in many cases, ultimately inherent to the database paradigm. While in the area of AI declarative languages are usually the preferred choice, other areas of CS heavily rely on the extended relational paradigm. This paper, then, will be concerned with the representation of historic information in two well known temporal query languages: it Templog in the context of temporal deductive databases, and it TSQL2 in the context of temporal relational databases. We hope the results highlighted here will increase cross-fertilisation between different communities. This article can be related to recent publications drawing the attention towards the different approaches followed by the Databases and AI communities when using time-related concepts

Combining Relational Algebra, SQL, Constraint Modelling, and Local Search

The goal of this paper is to provide a strong integration between constraint modelling and relational DBMSs. To this end we propose extensions of standard query languages such as relational algebra and SQL, by adding constraint modelling capabilities to them. In particular, we propose non-deterministic extensions of both languages, which are specially suited for combinatorial problems. Non-determinism is introduced by means of a guessing operator, which declares a set of relations to have an arbitrary extension. This new operator results in languages with higher expressive power, able to express all problems in the complexity class NP. Some syntactical restrictions which make data complexity polynomial are shown. The effectiveness of both extensions is demonstrated by means of several examples. The current implementation, written in Java using local search techniques, is described. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

On the Complexity of Nonrecursive XQuery and Functional Query Languages on Complex Values

This paper studies the complexity of evaluating functional query languages for complex values such as monad algebra and the recursion-free fragment of XQuery. We show that monad algebra with equality restricted to atomic values is complete for the class TA[2^{O(n)}, O(n)] of problems solvable in linear exponential time with a linear number of alternations. The monotone fragment of monad algebra with atomic value equality but without negation is complete for nondeterministic exponential time. For monad algebra with deep equality, we establish TA[2^{O(n)}, O(n)] lower and exponential-space upper bounds. Then we study a fragment of XQuery, Core XQuery, that seems to incorporate all the features of a query language on complex values that are traditionally deemed essential. A close connection between monad algebra on lists and Core XQuery (with ``child'' as the only axis) is exhibited, and it is shown that these languages are expressively equivalent up to representation issues. We show that Core XQuery is just as hard as monad algebra w.r.t. combined complexity, and that it is in TC0 if the query is assumed fixed.Comment: Long version of PODS 2005 pape