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Finite-Cliquewidth Sets of Existential Rules: Toward a General Criterion for Decidable yet Highly Expressive Querying

2022/09/06 by Feller, Thomas, Lyon, Tim S., Ostropolski-Nalewaja, Piotr +1
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Databases (cs.DB) #Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Logic (math.LO) #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.02464

Abstract

In our pursuit of generic criteria for decidable ontology-based querying, we introduce 'finite-cliquewidth sets' (FCS) of existential rules, a model-theoretically defined class of rule sets, inspired by the cliquewidth measure from graph theory. By a generic argument, we show that FCS ensures decidability of entailment for a sizable class of queries (dubbed 'DaMSOQs') subsuming conjunctive queries (CQs). The FCS class properly generalizes the class of finite-expansion sets (FES), and for signatures of arity at most 2, the class of bounded-treewidth sets (BTS). For higher arities, BTS is only indirectly subsumed by FCS by means of reification. Despite the generality of FCS, we provide a rule set with decidable CQ entailment (by virtue of first-order-rewritability) that falls outside FCS, thus demonstrating the incomparability of FCS and the class of finite-unification sets (FUS). In spite of this, we show that if we restrict ourselves to single-headed rule sets over signatures of arity at most 2, then FCS subsumes FUS.

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