Practical Query Rewriting for DL-Lite with Numerical Predicates

Abstract

We present a method for answering ontology-mediated queries for DL-Lite extended with a concrete domain, where we allow concrete domain predicates to be used in the query as well. Our method is based on query rewriting, a well-known technique for ontology-based query answering (OBQA), where the knowledge provided by the ontology is compiled into the query so that the rewritten query can be evaluated directly over a database. This technique reduces the problem of query answering w.r.t. an ontology to query evaluation over a database instance. Specifically, we consider members of the DL-Lite family extended with unary and binary concrete domain predicates over the real numbers. While approaches for query rewriting DL-Lite with these concrete domain have been investigated theoretically, these approaches use a combined approach in which also the data is processed, and require the concrete domain values occurring in the data to be known in advance, which makes the procedure data-dependent. In contrast, we show how rewritings can be computed in a data-independent fashion.