Recently, the field of knowledge representation is drawing a lot of inspiration from database theory. In particular, in the area of description logics and ontology languages, interest has shifted from satisfiability checking to query answering, with various query notions adopted from databases, like (unions of) conjunctive queries or different kinds of path queries. Likewise, the finite model semantics is being established as a viable and interesting alternative to the traditional semantics based on unrestricted models. In this paper, we investigate diverse database-inspired reasoning problems for very expressive description logics (all featuring the worrisome trias of inverses, counting, and nominals) which have in common that role paths of unbounded length can be described (in the knowledge base or of the query), leading to a certain non-locality of the reasoning problem. We show that for all the cases considered, undecidability can be established by very similar means. Most notably, we show undecidability of finite entailment of unions of conjunctive queries for a fragment of SHOIQ (the logic underlying the OWL DL ontology language), and undecidability of finite entailment of conjunctive queries for a fragment of SROIQ (the logical basis of the more recent and popular OWL 2 DL standard).

As the ontology component, we consider extensions of the DL ALC, allowing for transitive The use of ontologies to provide background knowledge closure of roles. The study of finite entailment is relevant for enriching answers to queries posed to a database is a for this combination because, unlike for plain CQs, query major research topic in the fields of knowledge representation entailment of CQs with transitive closure is not finitely controllable and reasoning. In this data-centric setting, various even for ALC, and thus finite and unrestricted entailment options for the formalisms used to express ontologies and do not coincide. As a consequence, dedicated algorithmic queries exist, but popular choices are description logics methods and lower bounds need to be developed.