Tabling is a technique first developed for natural language processing, where it was called Earley parsing. It consists of storing in a table (a.k.a. chart in the context of parsing) partial successful analyses that might come in handy for future reuse.
Tabling consists of maintaining a table of goals that are called during execution, along with their answers, and then using the answers directly when the same goal is subsequently called. Tabling gives a guarantee of total correctness for any (pure) Prolog program without function symbols.[1]
Tabling can be extended in various directions. It can support recursive predicates through SLG resolution or linear tabling. In a multi-threaded Prolog system tabling results could be kept private to a thread or shared among all threads. And in incremental tabling, tabling might react to changes.[2][3]