Taming the Infinite Chase: Query Answering under Expressive Integrity Constraints

Abstract

The chase algorithm is a fundamental tool for query evaluation and query containment under constraints, where the constraints are (sub-classes of) tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and equality generating depencies (EGDs). So far, most of the research on this topic has focused on cases where the chase procedure terminates, with some notable exceptions. In this paper we take a general approach, and we propose large classes of TGDs under which the chase does not always terminate. Our languages, in particular, are inspired by guarded logic: we show that by enforcing syntactic properties on the form of the TGDs, we are able to ensure decidability of the problem of answering conjunctive queries despite the non-terminating chase. We provide tight complexity bounds for the problem of conjunctive query evaluation for several classes of TGDs. We then introduce EGDs, and provide a condition under which EGDs do not interact with TGDs, and therefore do not take part in query answering. We show applications of our classes of constraints to the problem of answering conjunctive queries under F-Logic Lite, a recently introduced ontology language, and under prominent tractable Description Logics languages. All the results in this paper immediately extend to the problem of conjunctive query containment.