Query Rewriting with Disjunctive Existential Rules and Mappings

Abstract: We consider the issue of answering unions of conjunctive queries (UCQs) with disjunctive existential rules and mappings. While this issue has already been well studied from a chase perspective, query rewriting within UCQs has hardly been addressed yet. We first propose a sound and complete query rewriting operator, which has the advantage of establishing a tight relationship between a chase step and a rewriting step. The associated breadth-first query rewriting algorithm outputs a minimal UCQ-rewriting when one exists. Second, we show that for any ``truly disjunctive'' nonrecursive rule, there exists a conjunctive query that has no UCQ-rewriting. It follows that the notion of finite unification sets (fus), which denotes sets of existential rules such that any UCQ admits a UCQ-rewriting, seems to have little relevance in this setting. Finally, turning our attention to mappings, we show that the problem of determining whether a UCQ admits a UCQ-rewriting through a disjunctive mapping is undecidable. We conclude with a number of open problems.