Tie-Breaking Semantics and Structural Totality (Extended Abstract)

Summary: Introduce tie-breaking semantics for Datalog with negation: a polynomial-time computable fixpoint semantics that guarantees a fixpoint whenever the rule–goal graph has no cycle with an odd number of negative edges. Show maximality: presence of an odd-negative cycle implies non-structural totality (an alphabetic variant lacking any fixpoint) and nonstructural totality is undecidable. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 950
Venue: PODS
Year: 1992
Pagerank: 6.105189e-05
Overall Rank: 5,735 | 60.66%
DOI: 10.1145/137097.137103

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christos H. Papadimitriou (University of California San Diego)
2. Mihalis Yannakakis (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{papadimitriou_pods92,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '92},
        title = {{Tie-Breaking Semantics and Structural Totality (Extended Abstract)}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/137097.137103},
        doi = {10.1145/137097.137103},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Papadimitriou, Christos H. and Yannakakis, Mihalis},
        year = {1992}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,964	Negation and Minimality in Non-Horn Databases	1993	PODS	6.0262735e-05
12,991	Structural Totality and Constraint Stratification	1995	PODS	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
313	OPTIMIZING DATALOG PROGRAMS (Extended Abstract)	1987	PODS	0.0002168869

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