  By introducing the concepts of a loop and a loop formula, Lin and Zhao showed
that the answer sets of a nondisjunctive logic program are exactly the models
of its Clark's completion that satisfy the loop formulas of all loops.
Recently, Gebser and Schaub showed that the Lin-Zhao theorem remains correct
even if we restrict loop formulas to a special class of loops called
``elementary loops.'' In this paper, we simplify and generalize the notion of
an elementary loop, and clarify its role. We propose the notion of an
elementary set, which is almost equivalent to the notion of an elementary loop
for nondisjunctive programs, but is simpler, and, unlike elementary loops, can
be extended to disjunctive programs without producing unintuitive results. We
show that the maximal unfounded elementary sets for the ``relevant'' part of a
program are exactly the minimal sets among the nonempty unfounded sets. We also
present a graph-theoretic characterization of elementary sets for
nondisjunctive programs, which is simpler than the one proposed in (Gebser &
Schaub 2005). Unlike the case of nondisjunctive programs, we show that the
problem of deciding an elementary set is coNP-complete for disjunctive
programs.
