Query rewriting for inconsistent DL-lite ontologies

In this paper we study the problem of obtaining meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent DL-Lite ontologies. We consider different variants of inconsistency-tolerant semantics and show that for some of such variants answering unions of conjunctive queries (UCQs) is first-order (FOL) rewritable, i.e., it can be reduced to standard evaluation of a FOL/SQL query over a database. Since FOL-rewritability of query answering for UCQs over consistent ontologies under first-order logic semantics is one of the distinguishing features of DL-Lite, in this paper we actually identify some settings in which such property is preserved also under inconsistency-tolerant semantics. We therefore show that in such settings inconsistency-tolerant query answering has the same computational complexity of standard query answering and that it can rely on well-established relational database technology, as under standard DL semantics. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.