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Ontology-based query answering with existential rules is well understood and implemented for positive queries, in particular conjunctive queries. The situation changes drastically for queries with negation, where there is no agreed-upon…
Existential rules, also known as data dependencies in Databases, have been recently rediscovered as a promising family of languages for Ontology-based Query Answering. In this paper, we prove that disjunctive embedded dependencies exactly…
We study the notion of boundedness in the context of positive existential rules, that is, whether there exists an upper bound to the depth of the chase procedure, that is independent from the initial instance. By focussing our attention on…
Existential rules, a.k.a. dependencies in databases, and Datalog+/- in knowledge representation and reasoning recently, are a family of important logical languages widely used in computer science and artificial intelligence. Towards a deep…
This thesis investigates the central role of homomorphism problems (structure-preserving maps) in two complementary domains: database querying over finite, graph-shaped data, and constraint solving over (potentially infinite) structures.…
We consider existential rules (aka Datalog+) as a formalism for specifying ontologies. In recent years, many classes of existential rules have been exhibited for which conjunctive query (CQ) entailment is decidable. However, most of these…
We show that all--instances termination of chase is undecidable. More precisely, there is no algorithm deciding, for a given set $\cal T$ consisting of Tuple Generating Dependencies (a.k.a. Datalog$^\exists$ program), whether the $\cal…
The chase is a fundamental algorithm with ubiquitous uses in database theory. Given a database and a set of existential rules (aka tuple-generating dependencies), it iteratively extends the database to ensure that the rules are satisfied in…
The disjunctive restricted chase is a sound and complete procedure for solving boolean conjunctive query entailment over knowledge bases of disjunctive existential rules. Alas, this procedure does not always terminate and checking if it…
Extensive research in the field of ontology-based query answering has led to the identification of numerous fragments of existential rules (also known as tuple-generating dependencies) that exhibit decidable answering of atomic and…
We study the problem to decide, given sets T1,T2 of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs), also called existential rules, whether T2 is a conservative extension of T1. We consider two natural notions of conservative extension, one pertaining…
The chase procedure is a fundamental algorithmic tool in database theory with a variety of applications. A key problem concerning the chase procedure is all-instances termination: for a given set of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs), is…
We consider entailment problems involving powerful constraint languages such as guarded existential rules, in which additional semantic restrictions are put on a set of distinguished relations. We consider restricting a relation to be…
Rule-based languages lie at the core of several areas of central importance to databases and artificial intelligence such as deductive databases and knowledge representation and reasoning. Disjunctive existential rules (a.k.a. disjunctive…
We consider entailment problems involving powerful constraint languages such as frontier-guarded existential rules in which we impose additional semantic restrictions on a set of distinguished relations. We consider restricting a relation…
The notion of an existentially closed model is generalised to a property of geometric morphisms between toposes. We show that important properties of existentially closed models extend to existentially closed geometric morphisms, such as…
Predicate logic is the premier choice for specifying classes of relational structures. Homomorphisms are key to describing correspondences between relational structures. Questions concerning the interdependencies between these two means of…
A non-deterministic recursion scheme recognizes a language of finite trees. This very expressive model can simulate, among others, higher-order pushdown automata with collapse. We show decidability of the diagonal problem for schemes. This…
We study the interaction of views, queries, and background knowledge in the form of existential rules. The motivating questions concern monotonic determinacy of a query using views w.r.t. rules, which refers to the ability to recover the…
We propose a generic framework for establishing the decidability of a wide range of logical entailment problems (briefly called querying), based on the existence of countermodels that are structurally simple, gauged by certain types of…