The Expressive Powers of the Logic Programming Semantics

Summary: Compares expressive power of 3-valued program completion, well-founded, and stable semantics for deductive databases, pinning down the exact power of the stable semantics and, under broad conditions, that of the well-founded semantics. Over infinite Herbrand models proves equivalence of the three semantics but, via a notion of uniform translatability, shows the well-founded semantics is strictly more expressive than 3-valued completion. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 900
Venue: PODS
Year: 1990
Pagerank: 5.4574671e-05
Overall Rank: 8,295 | 43.09%
DOI: 10.1145/298514.298564

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. John S. Schlipf (University of Cincinnati)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{schlipf_pods90,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '90},
        title = {{The Expressive Powers of the Logic Programming Semantics}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/298514.298564},
        doi = {10.1145/298514.298564},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Schlipf, John S.},
        year = {1990}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
13,027	Adding Disjunction to Datalog (Extended Abstract)	1994	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,297	The Alternating Fixpoint of Logic Programs with Negation (Extended Abstract)	1989	PODS	0.0001126031
1,419	Every Logic Program Has a Natural Stratification And an Iterated Least Fixed Point Model	1989	PODS	0.00010830412
1,522	Unfounded Sets and Well-Founded Semantics for General Logic Programs	1988	PODS	0.00010502706
2,028	A Procedural Semantics for Well Founded Negation in Logic Programs	1989	PODS	9.285972e-05
2,474	Logic Programming as Constructivism: A Formalization and its Application to Databases	1989	PODS	8.5305658e-05

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