Polynomial conjunctive query rewriting under unary inclusion dependencies

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is widely accepted as an important ingredient of the new generation of information systems. In the OBDA paradigm, potentially incomplete relational data is enriched by means of ontologies, representing intensional knowledge of the application domain. We consider the problem of conjunctive query answering in OBDA. Certain ontology languages have been identified as FO-rewritable (e.g., DL-Lite and sticky-join sets of TGDs), which means that the ontology can be incorporated into the user's query, thus reducing OBDA to standard relational query evaluation. However, all known query rewriting techniques produce queries that are exponentially large in the size of the user's query, which can be a serious issue for standard relational database engines. In this paper, we present a polynomial query rewriting for conjunctive queries under unary inclusion dependencies. On the other hand, we show that binary inclusion dependencies do not admit polynomial query rewriting algorithms

Ontology-based data access with databases: a short course

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is regarded as a key ingredient of the new generation of information systems. In the OBDA paradigm, an ontology defines a high-level global schema of (already existing) data sources and provides a vocabulary for user queries. An OBDA system rewrites such queries and ontologies into the vocabulary of the data sources and then delegates the actual query evaluation to a suitable query answering system such as a relational database management system or a datalog engine. In this chapter, we mainly focus on OBDA with the ontology language OWL 2QL, one of the three profiles of the W3C standard Web Ontology Language OWL 2, and relational databases, although other possible languages will also be discussed. We consider different types of conjunctive query rewriting and their succinctness, different architectures of OBDA systems, and give an overview of the OBDA system Ontop

Query Rewriting and Optimization for Ontological Databases

Ontological queries are evaluated against a knowledge base consisting of an extensional database and an ontology (i.e., a set of logical assertions and constraints which derive new intensional knowledge from the extensional database), rather than directly on the extensional database. The evaluation and optimization of such queries is an intriguing new problem for database research. In this paper, we discuss two important aspects of this problem: query rewriting and query optimization. Query rewriting consists of the compilation of an ontological query into an equivalent first-order query against the underlying extensional database. We present a novel query rewriting algorithm for rather general types of ontological constraints which is well-suited for practical implementations. In particular, we show how a conjunctive query against a knowledge base, expressed using linear and sticky existential rules, that is, members of the recently introduced Datalog+/- family of ontology languages, can be compiled into a union of conjunctive queries (UCQ) against the underlying database. Ontological query optimization, in this context, attempts to improve this rewriting process so to produce possibly small and cost-effective UCQ rewritings for an input query.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1312.5914 by other author

Query Answer Explanations under Existential Rules

Ontology-mediated query answering is an extensively studied paradigm, which aims at improving query answers with the use of a logical theory. In this paper, we focus on ontology languages based on existential rules, and we carry out a thorough complexity analysis of the problem of explaining query answers in terms of minimal subsets of database facts and related task

Teaching an RDBMS about ontological constraints

International audienceIn the presence of an ontology, query answers must reflect not only data explicitly present in the database, but also implicit data, which holds due to the ontology, even though it is not present in the database. A large and useful set of ontology languages enjoys FOL reducibility of query answering: answering a query can be reduced to evaluating a certain first-order logic (FOL) formula (obtained from the query and ontology) against only the explicit facts. We present a novel query optimization framework for ontology-based data access settings enjoying FOL reducibility. Our framework is based on searching within a set of alternative equivalent FOL queries, i.e., FOL reformulations, one with minimal evaluation cost when evaluated through a relational database system. We apply this framework to the DL-LiteR Description Logic underpinning the W3C's OWL2 QL ontology language, and demonstrate through experiments its performance benefits when two leading SQL systems, one open-source and one commercial, are used for evaluating the FOL query reformulations

A Review of Accessing Big Data with Significant Ontologies

Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) is a recently proposed approach which is able to provide a conceptual view on relational data sources. It addresses the problem of the direct access to big data through providing end-users with an ontology that goes between users and sources in which the ontology is connected to the data via mappings. We introduced the languages used to represent the ontologies and the mapping assertions technique that derived the query answering from sources. Query answering is divided into two steps: (i) Ontology rewriting, in which the query is rewritten with respect to the ontology into new query; (ii) mapping rewriting the query that obtained from previous step reformulating it over the data sources using mapping assertions. In this survey, we aim to study the earlier works done by other researchers in the fields of ontology, mapping and query answering over data sources

Towards Universal Languages for Tractable Ontology Mediated Query Answering

An ontology language for ontology mediated query answering (OMQA-language) is universal for a family of OMQA-languages if it is the most expressive one among this family. In this paper, we focus on three families of tractable OMQA-languages, including first-order rewritable languages and languages whose data complexity of the query answering is in AC0 or PTIME. On the negative side, we prove that there is, in general, no universal language for each of these families of languages. On the positive side, we propose a novel property, the locality, to approximate the first-order rewritability, and show that there exists a language of disjunctive embedded dependencies that is universal for the family of OMQA-languages with locality. All of these results apply to OMQA with query languages such as conjunctive queries, unions of conjunctive queries and acyclic conjunctive queries.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, the full version of a paper accepted for AAAI 2020. Some typos have been correcte

Ontology-mediated query answering over temporal data: a survey

We discuss the use of various temporal knowledge representation formalisms for ontology-mediated query answering over temporal data. In particular, we analyse ontology and query languages based on the linear temporal logic LTL, the multi-dimensional Halpern-Shoham interval temporal logic HSn, as well as the metric temporal logic MTL. Our main focus is on the data complexity of answering temporal ontology-mediated queries and their rewritability into standard first-order and datalog queries