No Arabic abstract
We show that, for OWL 2 QL ontology-mediated queries with (i) ontologies of bounded depth and conjunctive queries of bounded treewidth, (ii) ontologies of bounded depth and bounded-leaf tree-shaped conjunctive queries, and (iii) arbitrary ontologies and bounded-leaf tree-shaped conjunctive queries, one can construct and evaluate nonrecursive datalog rewritings by, respectively, LOGCFL, NL and LOGCFL algorithms, which matches the optimal combined complexity.
Our concern is the overhead of answering OWL 2 QL ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) in ontology-based data access compared to evaluating their underlying tree-shaped and bounded treewidth conjunctive queries (CQs). We show that OMQs with bounded-depth ontologies have nonrecursive datalog (NDL) rewritings that can be constructed and evaluated in LOGCFL for combined complexity, even in NL if their CQs are tree-shaped with a bounded number of leaves, and so incur no overhead in complexity-theoretic terms. For OMQs with arbitrary ontologies and bounded-leaf CQs, NDL-rewritings are constructed and evaluated in LOGCFL. We show experimentally feasibility and scalability of our rewritings compared to previously proposed NDL-rewritings. On the negative side, we prove that answering OMQs with tree-shaped CQs is not fixed-parameter tractable if the ontology depth or the number of leaves in the CQs is regarded as the parameter, and that answering OMQs with a fixed ontology (of infinite depth) is NP-complete for tree-shaped and LOGCFL for bounded-leaf CQs.
This paper investigates the impact of query topology on the difficulty of answering conjunctive queries in the presence of OWL 2 QL ontologies. Our first contribution is to clarify the worst-case size of positive existential (PE), non-recursive Datalog (NDL), and first-order (FO) rewritings for various classes of tree-like conjunctive queries, ranging from linear queries to bounded treewidth queries. Perhaps our most surprising result is a superpolynomial lower bound on the size of PE-rewritings that holds already for linear queries and ontologies of depth 2. More positively, we show that polynomial-size NDL-rewritings always exist for tree-shaped queries with a bounded number of leaves (and arbitrary ontologies), and for bounded treewidth queries paired with bounded depth ontologies. For FO-rewritings, we equate the existence of polysize rewritings with well-known problems in Boolean circuit complexity. As our second contribution, we analyze the computational complexity of query answering and establish tractability results (either NL- or LOGCFL-completeness) for a range of query-ontology pairs. Combining our new results with those from the literature yields a complete picture of the succinctness and complexity landscapes for the considered classes of queries and ontologies.
We give solutions to two fundamental computational problems in ontology-based data access with the W3C standard ontology language OWL 2 QL: the succinctness problem for first-order rewritings of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs), and the complexity problem for OMQ answering. We classify OMQs according to the shape of their conjunctive queries (treewidth, the number of leaves) and the existential depth of their ontologies. For each of these classes, we determine the combined complexity of OMQ answering, and whether all OMQs in the class have polynomial-size first-order, positive existential, and nonrecursive datalog rewritings. We obtain the succinctness results using hypergraph programs, a new computational model for Boolean functions, which makes it possible to connect the size of OMQ rewritings and circuit complexity.
We introduce and study several notions of approximation for ontology-mediated queries based on the description logics ALC and ALCI. Our approximations are of two kinds: we may (1) replace the ontology with one formulated in a tractable ontology language such as ELI or certain TGDs and (2) replace the database with one from a tractable class such as the class of databases whose treewidth is bounded by a constant. We determine the computational complexity and the relative completeness of the resulting approximations. (Almost) all of them reduce the data complexity from coNP-complete to PTime, in some cases even to fixed-parameter tractable and to linear time. While approximations of kind (1) also reduce the combined complexity, this tends to not be the case for approximations of kind (2). In some cases, the combined complexity even increases.
We consider ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on expressive description logics of the ALC family and (unions) of conjunctive queries, studying the rewritability into OMQs based on instance queries (IQs). Our results include exact characterizations of when such a rewriting is possible and tight complexity bounds for deciding rewritability. We also give a tight complexity bound for the related problem of deciding whether a given MMSNP sentence is equivalent to a CSP.