A Sound and Complete Backward Chaining Algorithm for Existential Rules

We address the issue of Ontology-Based Data Access which consists of exploiting the semantics expressed in ontologies while querying data. Ontologies are represented in the framework of existential rules, also known as Datalog+/-. We focus on the backward chaining paradigm, which involves rewriting the query (assumed to be a conjunctive query, CQ) into a set of CQs (seen as a union of CQs). The proposed algorithm accepts any set of existential rules as input and stops for so-called finite unification sets of rules (fus). The rewriting step relies on a graph notion, called a piece, which allows to identify subsets of atoms from the query that must be processed together. We first show that our rewriting method computes a minimal set of CQs when this set is finite, i.e., the set of rules is a fus. We then focus on optimizing the rewriting step. First experiments are reported.