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Bounds in Ontology-Based Data Access via Circuit Complexity

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Abstract

Ontology-based data access is an approach to organizing access to a database augmented with a logical theory. In this approach query answering proceeds through a reformulation of a given query into a new one that can be answered without any use of theory. Thus the problem reduces to the standard database setting. However, the size of the query may increase substantially during the reformulation. In this survey we review a recently developed framework on proving lower and upper bounds on the size of this reformulation by employing methods and results from Boolean Circuit Complexity. The survey does not assume from the reader any prior knowledge on ontology-based data access.

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Notes

  1. We use the word “database” in a wide informal sense, that is a database is an organized collection of data.

  2. Other separations are also known between classes in (3), see [22]. Here we mention only those that will be relevant to us.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Michael Zakharyaschev, Mikhail Vyalyi, Evgeny Zolin, Stanislav Kikot and the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the preliminary version of this survey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Steklov Mathematical Institute, Moscow, Russia

    Vladimir V. Podolskii

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  1. Vladimir V. Podolskii
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Correspondence to Vladimir V. Podolskii.

Additional information

This is a substantually refined and extended version of the paper [32] that appeared in the proceedings of CSR 2015 conference.

This work is supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant 14-50-00005 performed in Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences.

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Podolskii, V.V. Bounds in Ontology-Based Data Access via Circuit Complexity. Theory Comput Syst 61, 464–493 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-016-9707-z

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