FLAMANT 2025 Workshop

The 1st European Workshop on Formal Logic At Montpellier ANd database Theory

The goal of this workshop is to foster collaborations between researchers in the fields of computational logic and database theory. Instead of scheduling many presentations, the emphasis will be on small-group meetings, giving participants ample time to work together. Attendees are encouraged (and expected : ) to propose their own discussion topics and self-organize to explore these in detail.

1. Venue and Meeting Rooms

This workshop is hosted by Inria Montpellier and will take place in Building 5 of the LIRMM campus. Rooms 3.124, 3.133, and 3.156 are reserved for participants daily from 8:00 to 18:00, from February 10th to 21st.

2. External Participants and their Dates

3. Presentations

All four presentations will last around one hour, and will take place in Room 3.124 in Building 5 of the LIRMM campus. Coffee and tea will be provided : )
  • ICDT 2024 Invited Keynote: "Rule-based Ontologies: From Semantics to Syntax" by Andreas Pieris at 10:00 on the 11th of February (Tuesday)
    • Abstract: An ontology specifies an abstract model of a domain of interest via a formal language that is typically based on logic. Tuple-generating dependencies (tgds) and equality-generating dependencies (egds) originally introduced as a unifying framework for database integrity constraints, and later on used in data exchange and integration, are well suited for modeling ontologies that are intended for data-intensive tasks. The reason is that, unlike other popular formalisms such as description logics, tgds and egds can easily handle higher-arity relations that naturally occur in relational databases. In recent years, there has been an extensive study of tgd- and egd-based ontologies and of their applications to several different data-intensive tasks. In those studies, model theory plays a crucial role and it typically proceeds from syntax to semantics. In other words, the syntax of an ontology language is introduced first and then the properties of the mathematical structures that satisfy ontologies of that language are explored. There is, however, a mature and growing body of research in the reverse direction, i.e., from semantics to syntax. Here, the starting point is a collection of model-theoretic properties and the goal is to determine whether or not these properties characterize some ontology language. Such results are welcome as they pinpoint the expressive power of an ontology language in terms of insightful model-theoretic properties. The main aim of this tutorial is to present a comprehensive overview of model-theoretic characterizations of tgd- and egd-based ontology languages that are encountered in database theory and symbolic artificial intelligence.
    • Bio: Andreas Pieris is an Associate Professor at the University of Edinburgh and an Assistant Professor at the University of Cyprus. His research interests are database theory with emphasis on knowledge-enriched data and uncertain data, knowledge representation and reasoning, computational logic and its applications to computer science. He has published numerous papers, most of them in leading international conferences and journals. He has served on the PCs of many international conferences and workshops, including the top-tier database and AI conferences, and he was one of the general chairs for EDBT/ICDT 2022.
  • "A Parametric Graph Obstructions View Point on Width Parameters -- The Case of Treewidth and Minor Monotone Parameters" by Christophe Paul at 15:00 on the 14th of February (Friday)
    • Abstract: We introduce a graph-parametric framework for obtaining obstruction characterizations of graph parameters with respect to partial ordering relations. For this, we define the notions of class obstruction, parametric obstruction, and universal obstruction as combinatorial objects that determine the asymptotic behavior of graph parameters. Our framework permits a unified framework for classifying graph parameters. In this talk after revisiting a series of important minor monotone parameters, we will discuss 1) order theoretic conditions allowing such (finite) characterizations, 2) and how this framework allows to delineate the tractability classes of minor closed properties. This is joint work with Evangelos Protopapas and Dimitrios Thilikos.
    • Bio: Christophe Paul is Director of Research at CNRS and member of the ALGCO team from LIRMM. His main research interests are graph theory and graph algorithms.
  • "Bag Semantics Conjunctive Query Containment. Four Small Steps Towards Undecidability" by Jerzy Marcinkowski at 14:00 on the 17th of February (Monday)
    • Abstract: Decidability of Conjunctive Query containment for multiset semantics has been an open problem for more than 30 years now, and is probably the most intriguing fundamental open problem in database theory. Many attempts were made to show decidability, They only led to solving some isolated particular cases, but at least one such failed attempt produced a really beautiful technique. Several attempts were also made to show undecidability (and here is where I contributed a litte bit). They were not succesful either, but some more or less natural generalizations of the problem were proven to be undecidable. The techniques which lead to the known negative results are maybe not very deep, but certainly they are complicated. So, instead of boring you to death with a systematic lecture about my works (joint with Mateusz Orda and Piotr Ostropolski-Nalewaja) I will try to select, for you, some of the known techniques on both, the positive, and the negative sides
    • Bio: Jerzy Marcinkowski received his PhD degree, in 1993 , from the Mathematical Department of the University of Wrocław and spent his entire academic career (with the exception of a three semesters long post-doc at the Laboratoire d'I Informatique Fondamentale de Lille in France) working for the University of Wrocław, where he is currently serves as the head of the Department of Computer Science. His modus operandi is to try to attack well-abstracted, long standing open problems in logic in computer science, including database theory. Database theory people may know him for his work on DATALOG single rule program boundedness (1996), database repairs and consistent query answering, including prioritized repair (with Jan Chomicki and Sławek Staworko; 2000s) and, more recently, for his work on the Chase algorithm, where he proved (with his student Tomasz Gogacz) that all-instances chase termination is undecidable (2014). One of his main topics of interest in the last years has been query determinacy.
  • KR 2024 Invited Keynote: "KR Meets Data Quality" by Meghyn Bienvenu at 10:00 on the 18th of February (Tuesday)
    • Abstract: Real-world data notoriously suffers from various forms of imperfections (missing facts, erroneous facts, duplicates, etc.), which can limit its utility and lead to flawed analyses and unreliable decision making. This makes data quality an issue of paramount importance across application domains, and one which I'll argue can both benefit from KR research and serve as a testbed for KR techniques. Indeed, while recent years have seen increasing interest in machine learning-based approaches, declarative approaches to improving data quality remain highly relevant, due to their better interpretability. In this talk, I will illustrate the synergy between data quality and KR by giving an overview of some of my recent work on querying inconsistent data using repair-based semantics and on rule-based approaches to entity resolution, highlighting the insights gained and directions for future research.
    • Bio: Meghyn Bienvenu is a senior researcher (directrice de recherche) at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), based at the LaBRI research lab in Bordeaux, France. Her research interests span a range of topics in knowledge representation and reasoning and database theory, but she is best known for her contributions to ontology-mediated query answering and to the study of logic-based methods for handling inconsistent data. Bienvenu's research has been recognized by an invited Early Career Spotlight talk at IJCAI'16, the 2016 CNRS Bronze Medal in computer science, and together with her coauthors, a 2023 ACM PODS Alberto Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award. She has taken on numerous responsibilities within the AI, KR, and database theory communities, notably serving as PC co-chair for KR 2021 and associate editor of Artificial Intelligence Journal.

4. Slides

Click here to download the slides from all presentations.

5. Social Events

We will invite all external participants listed in Section 2 as well as all Boreal team members for lunch on the 12th (Wednesday) and the 18th (Tuesday) of February at Bistrot d'O at 12:15.

6. Contact

If you have any questions about the workshop or would like to participate, you may contact me at david.carral@inria.fr.

7. Acknowledgements

This workshop is funded by the Inria team Boreal, and by the LIRMM through the axe transverse LOGIQUES.