---
title: "Efficient Query Rewriting in the Description Logic EL and Beyond"
authors:
  - "Peter Hansen"
  - "Carsten Lutz"
  - "Inanç Seylan"
  - "Frank Wolter"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/428"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/0428.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2015
pages: "3034-3039"
track: "Special Track on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning"
keywords:
---

# Efficient Query Rewriting in the Description Logic EL and Beyond

Peter Hansen, Carsten Lutz, Inanç Seylan, Frank Wolter

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 3034-3039.

## Abstract

We propose a new type of algorithm for computing first-order (FO) rewritings of concept queries under ELHdr-TBoxes. The algorithm is tailored towards efficient implementation, yet complete. It outputs a succinct non-recursive datalog rewriting if the input is FO-rewritable and otherwise reports non-FO-rewritability. We carry out experiments with real-world ontologies which demonstrate excellent performance in practice and show that TBoxes originating from applications admit FO-rewritings of reasonable size in almost all cases, even when in theory such rewritings are not guaranteed to exist.