Tabling is a powerful resolution mechanism for logic programs that captures
their least fixed point semantics more faithfully than plain Prolog. In many
tabling applications, we are not interested in the set of all answers to a
goal, but only require an aggregation of those answers. Several works have
studied efficient techniques, such as lattice-based answer subsumption and
mode-directed tabling, to do so for various forms of aggregation.
While much attention has been paid to expressivity and efficient
implementation of the different approaches, soundness has not been considered.
This paper shows that the different implementations indeed fail to produce
least fixed points for some programs. As a remedy, we provide a formal
framework that generalises the existing approaches and we establish a soundness
criterion that explains for which programs the approach is sound.
This article is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.Comment: Paper presented at the 32nd International Conference on Logic
Programming (ICLP 2016), New York City, USA, 16-21 October 2016, 15 pages,
LaTeX, 0 PDF figure
