Leveraging equality generating dependencies for chase termination

Tuple- and equality-generating dependencies have a wide range of applications in knowledge representation and databases, including ontological reasoning, data exchange, and data cleaning. In such settings, the chase is a central tool for many reasoning tasks. Since the chase evaluation might not terminate and it is undecidable whether it terminates, several termination criteria have been proposed, that is, (decidable) sufficient conditions ensuring termination. One of the main weaknesses of current approaches is the limited analysis they perform on equality-generating dependencies (EGDs). In this paper, we show that an explicit analysis of EGDs can yield significant benefits and discuss a novel approach along this line.