Pablo Barceló, Gerald Berger, Andreas Pieris. PODS ’18: Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. May 2018. Pages 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196959.3196963
Many efforts have been dedicated to identifying restrictions on ontologies expressed as tuple-generating dependencies (tgds), a.k.a. existential rules, that lead to the decidability of answering ontology-mediated queries (OMQs). This has given rise to three families of formalisms: guarded, non-recursive, and sticky sets of tgds. We study the containment problem for OMQs expressed in such formalisms, which is a key ingredient for solving static analysis tasks associated with them. Our main contribution is the development of specially tailored techniques for OMQ containment under the classes of tgds stated above. This enables us to obtain sharp complexity bounds for the problems at hand.