Queries with negation and inequalities over lightweight ontologies

Abstract

While the problem of answering positive existential queries, in particular, conjunctive queries (CQs) and unions of CQs, over description logic ontologies has been studied extensively, there have been few attempts to analyse queries with negated atoms. Our aim is to sharpen the complexity landscape of the problem of answering CQs with negation and inequalities in lightweight description logics of the DL-Lite and EL families. We begin by considering queries with safe negation and show that there is a surprisingly significant increase in the complexity from AC0 to undecidability (even if the ontology and query are fixed and only the data is regarded as input). We also investigate the problem of answering queries with inequalities and show that answering a single CQ with one inequality over DL-Lite with role inclusions is undecidable. In the light of our undecidability results, we explore syntactic restrictions to attain efficient query answering with negated atoms. In particular, we identify a novel class of local CQs with inequalities, for which query answering over DL-Lite is decidable.