107 research outputs found
Eliminating Recursion from Monadic Datalog Programs on Trees
We study the problem of eliminating recursion from monadic datalog programs
on trees with an infinite set of labels. We show that the boundedness problem,
i.e., determining whether a datalog program is equivalent to some nonrecursive
one is undecidable but the decidability is regained if the descendant relation
is disallowed. Under similar restrictions we obtain decidability of the problem
of equivalence to a given nonrecursive program. We investigate the connection
between these two problems in more detail
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
The Complexity of Datalog on Linear Orders
We study the program complexity of datalog on both finite and infinite linear
orders. Our main result states that on all linear orders with at least two
elements, the nonemptiness problem for datalog is EXPTIME-complete. While
containment of the nonemptiness problem in EXPTIME is known for finite linear
orders and actually for arbitrary finite structures, it is not obvious for
infinite linear orders. It sharply contrasts the situation on other infinite
structures; for example, the datalog nonemptiness problem on an infinite
successor structure is undecidable. We extend our upper bound results to
infinite linear orders with constants.
As an application, we show that the datalog nonemptiness problem on Allen's
interval algebra is EXPTIME-complete.Comment: 21 page
On the k-Boundedness for Existential Rules
The chase is a fundamental tool for existential rules. Several chase variants
are known, which differ on how they handle redundancies possibly caused by the
introduction of nulls. Given a chase variant, the halting problem takes as
input a set of existential rules and asks if this set of rules ensures the
termination of the chase for any factbase. It is well-known that this problem
is undecidable for all known chase variants. The related problem of boundedness
asks if a given set of existential rules is bounded, i.e., whether there is a
predefined upper bound on the number of (breadth-first) steps of the chase,
independently from any factbase. This problem is already undecidable in the
specific case of datalog rules. However, knowing that a set of rules is bounded
for some chase variant does not help much in practice if the bound is unknown.
Hence, in this paper, we investigate the decidability of the k-boundedness
problem, which asks whether a given set of rules is bounded by an integer k. We
prove that k-boundedness is decidable for three chase variants, namely the
oblivious, semi-oblivious and restricted chase.Comment: 20 pages, revised version of the paper published at RuleML+RR 201
Bounded Implication for Existential Rules
The property of boundedness in Datalog formalizes whether a set of rules can be equivalently expressed by a non-recursive set of rules. Existential rules extend Datalog to the presence of existential variables in rule heads. In this paper, we introduce and study notions of boundedness for existential rules. We provide a notion of weak boundedness and a notion of strong boundedness for a rule set, and show that they correspond, respectively, to the notions of first-order rewritability of atomic queries and first-order rewritability of conjunctive queries over the set. While weak and strong boundedness are in general not equivalent, we show that, for some notable subclasses of existential rules, i.e., Datalog, single-head binary rules, and frontier-guarded rules, the two notions coincide
Recurrence with affine level mappings is P-time decidable for CLP(R)
In this paper we introduce a class of constraint logic programs such that
their termination can be proved by using affine level mappings. We show that
membership to this class is decidable in polynomial time.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP
Decidability Results for the Boundedness Problem
We prove decidability of the boundedness problem for monadic least
fixed-point recursion based on positive monadic second-order (MSO) formulae
over trees. Given an MSO-formula phi(X,x) that is positive in X, it is
decidable whether the fixed-point recursion based on phi is spurious over the
class of all trees in the sense that there is some uniform finite bound for the
number of iterations phi takes to reach its least fixed point, uniformly across
all trees. We also identify the exact complexity of this problem. The proof
uses automata-theoretic techniques. This key result extends, by means of
model-theoretic interpretations, to show decidability of the boundedness
problem for MSO and guarded second-order logic (GSO) over the classes of
structures of fixed finite tree-width. Further model-theoretic transfer
arguments allow us to derive major known decidability results for boundedness
for fragments of first-order logic as well as new ones
Logic Programming and Logarithmic Space
We present an algebraic view on logic programming, related to proof theory
and more specifically linear logic and geometry of interaction. Within this
construction, a characterization of logspace (deterministic and
non-deterministic) computation is given via a synctactic restriction, using an
encoding of words that derives from proof theory.
We show that the acceptance of a word by an observation (the counterpart of a
program in the encoding) can be decided within logarithmic space, by reducing
this problem to the acyclicity of a graph. We show moreover that observations
are as expressive as two-ways multi-heads finite automata, a kind of pointer
machines that is a standard model of logarithmic space computation
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