In the context of ontology-based data access with description logics (DLs), we study ontology-mediated queries in which selected predicates can be closed (OMQCs). In particular, we contribute to the classification of the data complexity of such queries in several relevant DLs. For the case where only concept names can be closed, we tightly link this question to the complexity of surjective CSPs. When also role names can be closed, we show that a full complexity classification is equivalent to classifying the complexity of all problems in coNP, thus currently out of reach. We also identify a class of OMQCs based on ontologies formulated in DL-LiteR that are guaranteed to be tractable and even FO-rewritable.

We address the issue of Ontology-Based Query Answering (OBQA), which seeks to exploit knowledge expressed in ontologies when querying data. Ontologies are represented in the framework of existential rules (aka Datalog+/-). A commonly used technique consists in rewriting queries into unions of conjunctive queries (UCQs). However, the obtained queries can be prohibitively large in practice. A well-known source of combinatorial explosion are very simple rules, typically expressing taxonomies and relation signatures. We propose a rewriting technique, which consists in compiling these rules into a preorder on atoms and embedding this preorder into the rewriting process. This allows to compute compact rewritings that can be considered as ``pivotal'' representations, in the sense that they can be evaluated by different kinds of database systems. The provided algorithm computes a sound, complete and minimal UCQ rewriting, if one exists. Experiments show that this technique leads to substantial gains, in terms of size and runtime, and scales on very large ontologies. We also compare to other tools for OBQA with existential rules and related lightweight description logics.

Description Logic (DL) based ontologies and non-monotonic rules provide complementary features whose combination is crucial in many applications. In hybrid knowledge bases (KBs), which combine both formalisms, for large real-world applications, often integrating knowledge originating from different sources, inconsistencies can easily occur. These commonly trivialize standard reasoning and prevent us from drawing any meaningful conclusions. When restoring consistency by changing the KB is not possible, paraconsistent reasoning offers an alternative by allowing us to obtain meaningful conclusions from its consistent part. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently obtaining meaningful conclusions from (possibly inconsistent) hybrid KBs. To this end, we define two paraconsistent semantics for hybrid KBs which, beyond their differentiating properties, are faithful to well-known paraconsistent semantics as well as the non-paraconsistent logic they extend, and tractable if reasoning in the DL component is.

We study the problem of rewriting an ontology O1 expressed in a DL L1 into an ontology O2 in a Horn DL L2 such that O1 and O2 are equisatisfiable when extended with an arbitrary dataset.  Ontologies that admit such rewritings are amenable to reasoning techniques ensuring tractability in data complexity.  After showing undecidability whenever L1 extends ALCF , we focus on devising efficiently checkable conditions that ensure existence of a Horn rewriting.  By lifting existing techniques for rewriting Disjunctive Datalog programs into plain Datalog to the case of arbitrary first-order programs with function symbols, we identify a class of ontologies that admit Horn rewritings of polynomial size.  Our experiments indicate that many real-world ontologies satisfy our sufficient conditions and thus admit polynomial Horn rewritings.

Schema.org is an initiative by the major search engine providers Bing, Google, Yahoo, and Yandex that provides a collection of ontologies which webmasters can use to mark up their pages. Schema.org comes without a formal language definition and without a clear semantics. We formalize the language of Schema.org as a Description Logic (DL) and study the complexity of querying data using (unions of) conjunctive queries in the presence of ontologies formulated in this DL (from several perspectives). While querying is intractable in general, we identify various cases in which it is tractable and where queries are even rewritable into FO queries or datalog programs.

We propose a new type of algorithm for computing first-order (FO) rewritings of concept queries under ELHdr-TBoxes. The algorithm is tailored towards efficient implementation, yet complete. It outputs a succinct non-recursive datalog rewriting if the input is FO-rewritable and otherwise reports non-FO-rewritability. We carry out experiments with real-world ontologies which demonstrate excellent performance in practice and show that TBoxes originating from applications admit FO-rewritings of reasonable size in almost all cases, even when in theory such rewritings are not guaranteed to exist.

We consider the scenario of ontology-based query answering. It is generally accepted that true scalability in this setting can only be achieved via query rewriting, which in turn allows for the exploitation of standard RDBMSs. In this work, we close two open fundamental questions related to query rewriting. We establish that linear existential rules are polynomially combined rewritable, while full linear rules are polynomially (purely) rewritable; in both cases, the target query language consists of first-order or non-recursive Datalog queries. An immediate consequence of our results is that DLR-Lite_R, the extension of DL-Lite_R with n-ary roles, is polynomially combined rewritable.

Combined approaches have become a successful technique for CQ answering over ontologies. Existing algorithms, however, are restricted to the logics underpinning the OWL 2 profiles. Our goal is to make combined approaches applicable to a wider range of ontologies. We focus on RSA: a class of Horn ontologies that extends the profiles while ensuring tractability of standard reasoning. We show that CQ answering over RSA ontologies without role composition is feasible in NP. Our reasoning procedure generalises the combined approach for ELHO and DL-LiteR using an encoding of CQ answering into fact entailment w.r.t. a logic program with function symbols and stratified negation. Our results have significant practical implications since many out-of-profile Horn ontologies are RSA.

We study confidentiality enforcement in ontologies under the Controlled Query Evaluation framework, where a policy specifies the sensitive information and a censor ensures that query answers that may compromise the policy are not returned. We focus on censors that ensure confidentiality while maximising information access, and consider both Datalog and the OWL 2 profiles as ontology languages.

In this paper we investigate situation calculus action theories extended with ontologies, expressed as description logics TBoxes that act as state constraints. We show that this combination, while natural and desirable, is particularly problematic: it leads to undecidability of the simplest form of reasoning, namely satisfiability, even for the simplest kinds of description logics and the simplest kind of situation calculus action theories.