The Power of the Terminating Chase

Talk by Markus Krötzsch

Location: APB 3027
Start: 11. April 2019 at 1:00 pm
End: 11. April 2019 at 2:30 pm
Research group: Knowledge-Based Systems
Event series: KBS Seminar
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Abstract:

The chase has become a staple of modern database theory with applications in data integration, query optimisation, data exchange, ontology-based query answering, and many other areas. Most application scenarios and implementations require the chase to terminate and produce a finite universal model, and a large arsenal of sufficient termination criteria is available to guarantee this (generally undecidable) condition. In this invited tutorial, we therefore ask about the expressive power of logical theories for which the chase terminates. Specifically, which database properties can be recognised by such theories, i.e., which Boolean queries can they realise? For the skolem (semi-oblivious) chase, and almost any known termination criterion, this expressivity is just that of plain Datalog. Surprisingly, this limitation of most prior research does not apply to the chase in general. Indeed, we show that standard–chase terminating theories can realise queries with data complexities ranging from PTime to non-elementary that are out of reach for the terminating skolem chase. A “Datalog-first” standard chase that prioritises applications of rules without existential quantifiers makes modelling simpler – and we conjecture: computationally more efficient. This is one of the many open questions raised by our insights, and we conclude with an outlook on the research opportunities in this area.

This work has been published and presented at ICDT 2019, Lisbon, Portugal.

More info at: https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Inproceedings3203/en