Finite Entailment of Local Queries in the Z Family of Description Logics

Abstract

In the last few years the field of logic-based knowledge representation took a lot of inspiration from database theory. A vital example is that the finite model semantics in description logics (DLs) is reconsidered as a desirable alternative to the classical one and that query entailment has replaced knowledge-base satisfiability (KBSat) checking as the key inference problem. However, despite the considerable effort, the overall picture concerning finite query answering in DLs is still incomplete. In this work we study the complexity of finite entailment of local queries (conjunctive queries and positive boolean combinations thereof) in the Z family of DLs, one of the most powerful KR formalisms, lying on the verge of decidability. Our main result is that the DLs ZOQ and ZOI are finitely controllable, i.e. that their finite and unrestricted entailment problems for local queries coincide. This allows us to reuse recently established upper bounds on querying these logics under the classical semantics. While we will not solve finite query entailment for the third main logic in the Z family, ZIQ, we provide a generic reduction from the finite entail- ment problem to the finite KBSat problem, working for ZIQ and some of its sublogics. Our proofs unify and solidify previously established results on finite satisfiability and finite query entailment for many known DLs.