Tabling is a technique first developed for natural language processing, where it was called Earley parsing.
chart in the context of parsing) partial successful analyses that might come in handy for future reuse.
Tabling gives a guarantee of total correctness for any (pure) Prolog program without function symbols.
[2][3] The adaptation of tabling into a logic programming proof procedure, under the name of Earley deduction, dates from an unpublished note from 1975 by David H.D.
[4] An interpretation method based on tabling was later developed by Tamaki and Sato, modelled as a refinement of SLD-resolution.