On the decidability of logic programs and chase algorithms

Abstract

The problem of programs termination is a fundamental problem in Computer Science, and has always gained interest from research communities, due to the challenge of dealing with a problem that has been proved to be undecidable in general. Furthermore, there has been a great increase of interest from the logic programming and database communities in identifying meaningful and large fragments of the languages used, in order to guarantee termination of inference tasks. The goal of this thesis is to study the termination problem in the eld of logic programming with function symbols and in the eld of integrity database dependencies enforced via the Chase procedure. The state of the art for both elds is presented, identifying limitations of current works and new approaches to overcome such limitations are proposed.