English

The Data Complexity of Description Logic Ontologies

Artificial Intelligence 2023-06-22 v3

Abstract

We analyze the data complexity of ontology-mediated querying where the ontologies are formulated in a description logic (DL) of the ALC family and queries are conjunctive queries, positive existential queries, or acyclic conjunctive queries. Our approach is non-uniform in the sense that we aim to understand the complexity of each single ontology instead of for all ontologies formulated in a certain language. While doing so, we quantify over the queries and are interested, for example, in the question whether all queries can be evaluated in polynomial time w.r.t. a given ontology. Our results include a PTime/coNP-dichotomy for ontologies of depth one in the description logic ALCFI, the same dichotomy for ALC- and ALCI-ontologies of unrestricted depth, and the non-existence of such a dichotomy for ALCF-ontologies. For the latter DL, we additionally show that it is undecidable whether a given ontology admits PTime query evaluation. We also consider the connection between PTime query evaluation and rewritability into (monadic) Datalog.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.02453,
  title  = {The Data Complexity of Description Logic Ontologies},
  author = {Carsten Lutz and Frank Wolter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.02453},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:45:19.624Z