Catriel Beeri , Alon Y. Levy , Marie-Christine Rousset , Rewriting Queries Using Views in Description Logics Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGARTSymposium on Principles of Database Systems, Tucson, Arizona. 1997
Abstract: The problem of rewriting queries using views is to find a query
expression that uses only a set of views V and is equivalent to
(or maximally contained in) a given query Q. Rewriting queries using
views is important for query optimization and for applications such as
information integration and data warehousing. Description
logics are a family of logics that were developed for modeling
complex hierarchical structures, and can also be viewed as a query
language with an interesting tradeoff between complexity and
expressive power. We consider the problem of rewriting queries using
views expressed in description logics and conjunctive queries over
description logics. We show that if
the view definitions do not contain existential variables, then it is
always possible to find a rewriting that is a union of conjunctive
queries, and furthermore, this rewriting produces the maximal set of
answers possible from the views. If the views have existential
variables, the rewriting may be recursive. We present an algorithm for
producing a recursive rewriting, that is guaranteed to be a maximal
one when the underlying database forms a tree of constants. We show
that in general, it is not always be possible to find a maximal
rewriting.