Guarded tuple-generating dependencies (GTGDs) are a natural extension of description logics and referential constraints. It has long been known that queries over GTGDs can be answered by a variant of the chase —a quintessential technique for reasoning with dependencies. However, there has been little work on concrete algorithms and even less on implementation. To address this gap, we revisit Datalog rewriting approaches to query answering, where a set of GTGDs is transformed to a Datalog program that entails the same base facts on each base instance. We show that a rewriting consists of “shortcut” rules that circumvent certain chase steps, we present several algorithms that compute a rewriting by deriving such “shortcuts” efficiently, and we discuss important implementation issues. Finally, we show empirically that our techniques can process complex GTGDs derived from synthetic and real benchmarks and are thus suitable for practical use.

Guarded tuple-generating dependencies (GTGDs) are a natural extension of description logics and referential constraints. It has long been known that queries over GTGDs can be answered by a variant of the chase ---a quintessential technique for reasoning with dependencies. However, there has been little work on concrete algorithms and even less on implementation. To address this gap, we revisit Datalog rewriting approaches to query answering, where GTGDs are transformed to a Datalog program that entails the same base facts on each base instance. We show that the rewriting can be seen as containing "shortcut" rules that circumvent certain chase steps, we present several algorithms that compute the rewriting by simulating specific types of chase steps, and we discuss important implementation issues. Finally, we show empirically that our techniques can process complex GTGDs derived from synthetic and real benchmarks and are thus suitable for practical use.

In this paper, we consider existential rules, an expressive formalism well adapted to the representation of ontological knowledge, as well as data-to-ontology mappings in the context of ontology-based data integration. The chase is a fundamental tool to do reasoning with existential rules as it computes all the facts entailed by the rules from a database instance. We introduce parallelisable sets of existential rules, for which the chase can be computed in a single breadth-first step from any instance. The question we investigate is the characterization of such rule sets. We show that parallelisable rule sets are exactly those rule sets both bounded for the chase and belonging to a novel class of rules, called pieceful. The pieceful class includes in particular frontier-guarded existential rules and (plain) datalog. We also give another characterization of parallelisable rule sets in terms of rule composition based on rewriting.

International audience

We consider the problem of integrating heterogeneous data (relational, JSON, key-values, graphs etc.) and querying it efficiently. Traditional data integration systems fall into two classes: data warehousing , where all data source content is materialized in a single repository, and mediation , where data remains in their original stores and all data can be queried through a mediator. We propose to demonstrate Obi-Wan, a novel mediator following the Ontology-Based Data access (OBDA) paradigm. Obi-Wan integrates data sources of many data models under an interface based on RDF graphs and ontologies (classes, properties, and relations between them). The novelty of Obi-Wan is to combine maximum integration power (GLAV mappings, see below) with the highest query answering power supported by an RDF mediator: RDF queries not only over the data but also over the integration ontologies. This makes it more flexible and powerful than comparable systems.

Query answering in RDF knowledge bases has traditionally been performed either through graph saturation, i.e., adding all implicit triples to the graph, or through query reformulation, i.e., modifying the query to look for the explicit triples entailing precisely what the original query asks for. The most expressive fragment of RDF for which Reformulation-based query answering exists is the so-called database fragment [ 13 ], in which implicit triples are restricted to those entailed using an RDFS ontology. Within this fragment, query answering was so far limited to the interrogation of data triples (non-RDFS ones); however, a powerful feature specific to RDF is the ability to query data and schema triples together. In this paper, we address the general query answering problem by reducing it, through a pre-query reformulation step, to that solved by the query reformulation technique of [ 13 ]. We also report on experiments demonstrating the low cost of our reformulation algorithm.