Victor Dalmau

Balder ten Cate, Victor Dalmau

We answer the question which conjunctive queries are uniquely characterized by polynomially many positive and negative examples, and how to construct such examples efficiently. As a consequence, we obtain a new efficient exact learning algorithm for a class of conjunctive queries. At the core of our contributions lie two new polynomial-time algorithms for constructing frontiers in the homomorphism lattice of finite structures. We also discuss implications for the unique characterizability and learnability of schema mappings and of description logic concepts.

Pablo Barcelo, Victor Dalmau, Cristina Feier et al.

Ontology-mediated querying and querying in the presence of constraints are two key database problems where tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) play a central role. In ontology-mediated querying, TGDs can formalize the ontology and thus derive additional facts from the given data, while in querying in the presence of constraints, they restrict the set of admissible databases. In this work, we study the limits of efficient query evaluation in the context of the above two problems, focussing on guarded and frontier-guarded TGDs and on UCQs as the actual queries. We show that a class of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on guarded TGDs can be evaluated in FPT iff the OMQs in the class are equivalent to OMQs in which the actual query has bounded treewidth, up to some reasonable assumptions. For querying in the presence of constraints, we consider classes of constraint-query specifications (CQSs) that bundle a set of constraints with an actual query. We show a dichotomy result for CQSs based on guarded TGDs that parallels the one for OMQs except that, additionally, FPT coincides with PTime combined complexity. The proof is based on a novel connection between OMQ and CQS evaluation. Using a direct proof, we also show a similar dichotomy result, again up to some reasonable assumptions, for CQSs based on frontier-guarded TGDs with a bounded number of atoms in TGD heads. Our results on CQSs can be viewed as extensions of Grohe's well-known characterization of the tractable classes of CQs (without constraints). Like Grohe's characterization, all the above results assume that the arity of relation symbols is bounded by a constant. We also study the associated meta problems, i.e., whether a given OMQ or CQS is equivalent to one in which the actual query has bounded treewidth.

Victor Dalmau

Many existing global constraints can be encoded as a conjunction of among constraints. An among constraint holds if the number of the variables in its scope whose value belongs to a prespecified set, which we call its range, is within some given bounds. It is known that domain filtering algorithms can benefit from reasoning about the interaction of among constraints so that values can be filtered out taking into consideration several among constraints simultaneously. The present pa- per embarks into a systematic investigation on the circumstances under which it is possible to obtain efficient and complete domain filtering algorithms for conjunctions of among constraints. We start by observing that restrictions on both the scope and the range of the among constraints are necessary to obtain meaningful results. Then, we derive a domain flow-based filtering algorithm and present several applications. In particular, it is shown that the algorithm unifies and generalizes several previous existing results.