An Optimization for Reasoning with Forest Logic Programs

Open Answer Set Programming (OASP) is an attractive framework for integrating ontologies and rules. In general OASP is undecidable. In previous work we provided a tableau-based algorithm for satisfiability checking w.r.t. forest logic programs, a decidable fragment of OASP, which has the forest model property. In this paper we introduce an optimized version of that algorithm achieved by means of a knowledge compilation technique. So-called unit completion structures, which are possible building blocks of a forest model, in the form of trees of depth 1, are computed in an initial step of the algorithm. Repeated computations are avoided by using these structures in a pattern-matching style when constructing a model. Furthermore we identify and discard redundant unit completion structures: a structure is redundant if there is another structure which can always replace the original structure in a forest model.