Relaxing and Restraining Queries for OBDA

Abstract We advocate the use of ontologies for relaxing and restraining queries, so that they retrieve either more or less answers, enabling the exploration of a given dataset. We propose a set of rewriting rules to relax and restrain conjunctive queries (CQs) over datasets mediated by an ontology written in a dialect of DL-Lite with complex role inclusions (CRIs). The addition of CRI enables the representation of knowledge about data involving ordered hierarchies of categories, in the style of multi-dimensional data models. Although CRIs in general destroy the first-order rewritability of CQs, we identify settings in which CQs remain rewritable.