Tree-like Queries in OWL 2 QL: Succinctness and Complexity Results
This work provides foundational insights into query answering complexity in description logics, impacting database and AI systems that rely on ontological reasoning.
The paper investigates how query topology affects the difficulty of answering conjunctive queries with OWL 2 QL ontologies, establishing superpolynomial lower bounds for some rewritings and polynomial-size rewritings for others, along with tractability results for various query-ontology pairs.
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.