Restricted Chase Termination: A Hierarchical Approach and Experimentation

The chase procedure for existential rules is an indispensable tool for several database applications, where its termination guarantees decidability of these tasks. Most previous studies have focused on the Skolem chase variant and its termination analysis. It is known that the restricted chase variant is more powerful in termination analysis provided a database is given. But all-instance termination presents a challenge since the critical database and similar techniques do not work. We develop a novel technique to characterize the activeness of all possible cycles of a certain length for restricted chase, which leads to the formulation of a parameterized class of finite restricted chase, called k-\(\mathsf {safe}(\varPhi )\). This approach is applicable to any class of finite Skolem chase identified with a condition of acyclicity. More generally, we show that the approach can be applied to the entire hierarchy of bounded rule sets previously only defined for Skolem chase. Experiments on a collection of ontologies from the web show the applicability of the proposed methods on real-world ontologies.