The Bag Semantics of Ontology-Based Data Access

The Bag Semantics of Ontology-Based Data Access

Charalampos Nikolaou, Egor V. Kostylev, George Konstantinidis, Mark Kaminski, Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1224-1230. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/170

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is a popular approach for integrating and querying multiple data sources by means of a shared ontology. The ontology is linked to the sources using mappings, which assign views over the data to ontology predicates. Motivated by the need for OBDA systems supporting database-style aggregate queries, we propose a bag semantics for OBDA, where duplicate tuples in the views defined by the mappings are retained, as is the case in standard databases. We show that bag semantics makes conjunctive query answering in OBDA coNP-hard in data complexity. To regain tractability, we consider a rather general class of queries and show its rewritability to a generalisation of the relational calculus to bags.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Description Logics and Ontologies
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic: Knowledge Representation Languages