A New Partial Semantics for Disjunctive Deductive Databases

We propose a new partial semantics for disjunctive deductive databases that we call disjunctive well-founded semantics. This semantics extends the classical well-founded semantics of normal databases for disjunctive databases. We give a declarative definition as well as a computational procedure for this new semantics. We prove that, in the case of disjunctive positive databases, i.e. disjunctive databases without negation, the disjunctive well-founded semantics coincides with the intersection of the minimal models.