Harmless but Useful: Beyond Separable Equality Constraints in Datalog+/-

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'harmless' EGDs, a broader class of constraints in Datalog+/- that maintain tractability in query answering, extending beyond the limitations of separable EGDs.

Contribution

It defines harmless EGDs, provides a syntactic characterization, and demonstrates their applicability in Warded Datalog+/- for efficient, decidable query answering.

Findings

Harmless EGDs generalize separable EGDs and model more problems.

Query answering remains decidable and PTIME in data complexity with harmless EGDs.

Proposed chase-based techniques enable efficient reasoning in the extended framework.

Abstract

Ontological query answering is the problem of answering queries in the presence of schema constraints representing the domain of interest. Datalog+/- is a common family of languages for schema constraints, including tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and equality-generating dependencies (EGDs). The interplay of TGDs and EGDs leads to undecidability or intractability of query answering when adding EGDs to tractable Datalog+/- fragments, like Warded Datalog+/-, for which, in the sole presence of TGDs, query answering is PTIME in data complexity. There have been attempts to limit the interaction of TGDs and EGDs and guarantee tractability, in particular with the introduction of separable EGDs, to make EGDs irrelevant for query answering as long as the set of constraints is satisfied. While being tractable, separable EGDs have limited expressive power. We propose a more general class of EGDs, which we call "harmless", that subsume separable EGDs and allow to model a much broader class of problems. Unlike separable EGDs, harmless EGDs, besides enforcing ground equality constraints, specialize the query answer by grounding or renaming the labelled nulls introduced by existential quantification in the TGDs. Harmless EGDs capture the cases when the answer obtained in the presence of EGDs is less general than the one obtained with TGDs only. We conclude that the theoretical problem of deciding whether a set of constraints contains harmless EGDs is undecidable. We contribute a sufficient syntactic condition characterizing harmless EGDs, broad and useful in practice. We focus on Warded Datalog+/- with harmless EGDs and argue that, in such fragment, query answering is decidable and PTIME in data complexity. We study chase-based techniques for query answering in Warded Datalog+/- with harmless EGDs, conducive to an efficient algorithm to be implemented in state-of-the-art reasoners.