Modular Materialisation of Datalog Programs

Abstract The seminaïve algorithm can be used to materialise all consequences of a datalog program, and it also forms the basis for algorithms that incrementally update a materialisation as the input facts change. Certain (combinations of) rules, however, can be handled much more efficiently using custom algorithms. To integrate such algorithms into a general reasoning approach that can handle arbitrary rules, we propose a modular framework for computing and maintaining a materialisation. We split a datalog program into modules that can be handled using specialised algorithms, and we handle the remaining rules using the semina¨ıve algorithm. We also present two algorithms for computing the transitive and the symmetric– transitive closure of a relation that can be used within our framework. Finally, we show empirically that our framework can handle arbitrary datalog programs while outperforming existing approaches, often by orders of magnitude.