Second-Order Specifications and Quantifier Elimination for Consistent Query Answering in Databases

Consistent answers to a query from a possibly inconsistent database are answers that are simultaneously retrieved from every possible repair of the database. Repairs are consistent instances that minimally differ from the original inconsistent instance. It has been shown before that database repairs can be specified as the stable models of a disjunctive logic program. In this paper we show how to use the repair programs to transform the problem of consistent query answering into a problem of reasoning w.r.t. a theory written in second-order predicate logic. It also investigated how a first-order theory can be obtained instead by applying second-order quantifier elimination techniques.