Related papers: A Trichotomy in the Data Complexity of Certain Que…
We solve a well known, long-standing open problem in relational databases theory, showing that the conjunctive query determinacy problem (in its "unrestricted" version) is undecidable.
We study the computational problem of checking whether a quantified conjunctive query (a first-order sentence built using only conjunction as Boolean connective) is true in a finite poset (a reflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive directed…
When a relational database is queried, the result is normally a relation. Some queries, however, only require a yes/no answer; such queries are often called boolean queries. It is customary in database theory to express boolean queries by…
The resilience problem for a query and an input set or bag database is to compute the minimum number of facts to remove from the database to make the query false. In this paper, we study how to compute the resilience of Regular Path Queries…
A relational database is inconsistent if it does not satisfy a given set of integrity constraints. Nevertheless, it is likely that most of the data in it is consistent with the constraints. In this paper we apply logic programming based on…
Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize, and possibly compute causes for query answers. Connections between QA-causality and consistency-based diagnosis and database repairs (wrt. integrity constraint…
One fundamental question in database theory is the following: Given a Boolean conjunctive query Q, what is the best complexity for computing the answer to Q in terms of the input database size N? When restricted to the class of…
In case of incomplete database tables, a possible world is obtained by replacing any missing value by a value from the corresponding attribute's domain that can be infinite. A possible key or possible functional dependency constraint is…
In this work we establish and investigate connections between causality for query answers in databases, database repairs wrt. denial constraints, and consistency-based diagnosis. The first two are relatively new problems in databases, and…
Conjunctive query (CQ) evaluation is NP-complete, but becomes tractable for fragments of bounded hypertreewidth. Approximating a hard CQ by a query from such a fragment can thus allow for an efficient approximate evaluation. While…
A consistent query answer in an inconsistent database is an answer obtained in every (minimal) repair. The repairs are obtained by resolving all conflicts in all possible ways. Often, however, the user is able to provide a preference on how…
A temporal (constraint) language is a relational structure with a first-order definition in the rational numbers with the order. We study here the complexity of the Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problem (QCSP) for temporal constraint…
In this paper, we explore the issue of inconsistency handling over prioritized knowledge bases (KBs), which consist of an ontology, a set of facts, and a priority relation between conflicting facts. In the database setting, a closely…
We study the complexity of the valued constraint satisfaction problem (VCSP) for every valued structure with the domain ${\mathbb Q}$ that is preserved by all order-preserving bijections. Such VCSPs will be called temporal, in analogy to…
Constraint Programming (CP) has proved an effective paradigm to model and solve difficult combinatorial satisfaction and optimisation problems from disparate domains. Many such problems arising from the commercial world are permeated by…
Query evaluation on probabilistic databases is generally intractable (#P-hard). Existing dichotomy results have identified which queries are tractable (or safe), and connected them to tractable lineages. In our previous work, using…
A conjunctive query (CQ) is semantically acyclic if it is equivalent to an acyclic one. Semantic acyclicity has been studied in the constraint-free case, and deciding whether a query enjoys this property is NP-complete. However, in case the…
Consistent Query Answering (CQA) is an inconsistency-tolerant approach to data access in knowledge bases and databases. The goal of CQA is to provide meaningful (consistent) answers to queries even in the presence of inconsistent…
Dependence logic is a formalism that augments the syntax of first-order logic with dependence atoms asserting that the value of a variable is determined by the values of some other variables, i.e., dependence atoms express functional…
A class of relational databases has low degree if for all $\delta>0$, all but finitely many databases in the class have degree at most $n^{\delta}$, where $n$ is the size of the database. Typical examples are databases of bounded degree or…