Combining decidability paradigms for existential rules

Abstract

AbstractExistential rules are Datalog rules extended with existential quantifiers in rule-heads. Three fundamental restriction paradigms that have been studied for ensuring decidability of query answering under existential rules are weak-acyclicity, guardedness and stickiness. Towards the identification of even more expressive decidable languages, several attempts have been conducted to consolidate weak-acyclicity with the other two paradigms. However, it is not clear how guardedness and stickiness can be merged; this is the subject of this paper. A powerful and flexible condition, called tameness, is proposed, which allows us to consolidate in an elegant and uniform way guardedness with stickiness.