Polynomial Rewritings for Linear Existential Rules

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.