Publications

Stats

View publication

Title Query Languages for Data Exchange: Beyond Unions of Conjunctive Queries
Authors Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló, Juan Reutter
Publication date July 2011
Abstract The class of unions of conjunctive queries (UCQ) has
been shown to be particularly well-behaved for data exchange; its
certain answers can be computed in polynomial time (in terms of data
complexity). However, this is not the only class with this property;
the certain answers to any DATALOG program can also can be computed in
polynomial time. The problem is that both UCQ and DATALOG do not allow
negated atoms, as adding an unrestricted form of negation to these
languages yields to intractability.
\n\n
In this paper, we propose a language called DATALOG(C^neq) that
extends DATALOG with a restricted form of negation, and study some of
its fundamental properties. In particular, we show that the certain
answers to a DATALOG(C^neq) program can be computed in polynomial
time (in terms of data complexity), and that every union of
conjunctive queries with at most one inequality or negated relational
atom per disjunct, can be efficiently rewritten as a DATALOG(C^neq)
program in the context of data exchange. Furthermore, we show that
this is also the case for a syntactic restriction of the class of
unions of conjunctive queries with at most two inequalities per
disjunct. This syntactic restriction is given by two conditions that
are optimal, in the sense that computing certain answers becomes
intractable if one removes any of them. Finally, we provide a thorough
analysis of the combined complexity of computing certain answers to
DATALOG(C^neq) programs and other related query languages. In
particular, we show that this problem is EXPTIME-complete for
DATALOG(C^neq), even if one restricts to conjunctive queries with
single inequalities, which is a fragment of DATALOG(C^neq) by the
result mentioned above. Furthermore, we show that the combined
complexity is CONEXPTIME-complete for the case of conjunctive queries
with k inequalities, for every k >= 2.
Pages 489-564
Volume 49
Journal name Theory of Computing Systems
Publisher Springer-Verlag (Berlin/Heidelberg, Germany)
Reference URL View reference page