Logical queries over views

Abstract

We study the problem of deciding the satisfiability of first-order logic queries over views, with our aim to delimit the boundary between the decidable and the undecidable fragments of this language. Views currently occupy a central place in database research due to their role in applications such as information integration and data warehousing. Our main result is the identification of a decidable class of first-order queries over unary conjunctive views that generalizes the decidability of the classical class of first-order sentences over unary relations known as the Löwenheim class. We then demonstrate how various extensions of this class lead to undecidability and also provide some expressivity results. Besides its theoretical interest, our new decidable class is potentially interesting for use in applications such as deciding implication of complex dependencies, analysis of a restricted class of active database rules, and ontology reasoning.