Parallelisable Existential Rules: a Story of Pieces

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of parallelisable existential rules, characterizing rule sets that allow the chase procedure to be computed in a single step, thus improving reasoning efficiency in ontology-based data integration.

Contribution

It defines the class of pieceful rule sets, including frontier-guarded rules and datalog, and provides characterizations based on chase boundedness and rule rewriting.

Findings

Parallelisable rule sets are exactly those that are chase bounded and pieceful.

The class includes frontier-guarded rules and datalog.

Parallelisable rules can be characterized via rewriting methods.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider existential rules, an expressive formalism well suited to the representation of ontological knowledge and data-to-ontology mappings in the context of ontology-based data integration. The chase is a fundamental tool to do reasoning with existential rules as it computes all the facts entailed by the rules from a database instance. We introduce parallelisable sets of existential rules, for which the chase can be computed in a single breadth-first step from any instance. The question we investigate is the characterization of such rule sets. We show that parallelisable rule sets are exactly those rule sets both bounded for the chase and belonging to a novel class of rules, called pieceful. The pieceful class includes in particular frontier-guarded existential rules and (plain) datalog. We also give another characterization of parallelisable rule sets in terms of rule composition based on rewriting.