On the succinctness of query rewriting over shallow ontologies

Abstract

We investigate the succinctness problem for conjunctive query rewritings over OWL 2QL ontologies of depth 1 and 2 by means of hypergraph programs computing Boolean functions. Both positive and negative results are obtained. We show that, over ontologies of depth 1, conjunctive queries have polynomial-size nonrecursive datalog rewritings; tree-shaped queries have polynomial positive existential rewritings; however, in the worst case, positive existential rewritings can be superpolynomial. Over ontologies of depth 2, positive existential and nonrecursive datalog rewritings of conjunctive queries can suffer an exponential blowup, while first-order rewritings can be superpolynomial unless NP ⊆ P/poly. We also analyse rewritings of tree-shaped queries over arbitrary ontologies and note that query entailment for such queries is fixed-parameter tractable.