Polynomial Rewritings from Expressive Description Logics with Closed Predicates to Variants of Datalog

Abstract In many scenarios, complete and incomplete information coexist. For this reason, the knowledge representation and database communities have long shown interest in simultaneously supporting the closed- and the open-world views when reasoning about logic theories. Here we consider the setting of querying possibly incomplete data using logic theories, formalized as the evaluation of an ontology-mediated query (OMQ) that pairs a query with a theory, sometimes called an ontology, expressing background knowledge. This can be further enriched by specifying a set of closed predicates from the theory that are to be interpreted under the closed-world assumption, while the rest are interpreted with the open-world view. In this way we can retrieve more precise answers to queries by leveraging the partial completeness of the data. The central goal of this paper is to understand the relative expressiveness of ontology-mediated query languages in which the ontology part is written in the expressive Description Logic (DL) ALCHOI and includes a set of closed predicates. We consider a restricted class of conjunctive queries. Our main result is to show that every query in this non-monotonic query language can be translated in polynomial time into Datalog with negation as failure under the stable model semantics. To overcome the challenge that Datalog has no direct means to express the existential quantification present in ALCHOI , we define a two-player game that characterizes the satisfaction of the ontology, and design a Datalog query that can decide the existence of a winning strategy for the game. If there are no closed predicates—in the case of querying an ALCHOI knowledge base—our translation yields a positive disjunctive Datalog program of polynomial size. To the best of our knowledge, unlike previous translations for related fragments with expressive (non-Horn) DLs, these are the first polynomial time translations.