More on tractable disjunctive Datalog

Abstract

Sometimes it is more natural to express knowledge in disjunctive Datalog rather than in ordinary Datalog. Several highly complex variants of disjunctive Datalog have been proposed in the past and their expressive power has been studied. In this paper we investigate tractable fragments of disjunctive Datalog. Algorithms are presented to answer queries defined using these fragments and their complexity analyzed. Furthermore, the expressive power of these tractable subsets is studied. The most expressive of the languages considered here is shown to express, in some sense explained in the paper, all polynomial time queries. This is the first identified fragment of disjunctive Datalog with this property.