The goal of this work is to integrate in a general framework the dHferent query optimization techniques that have been proposed in the object-oriented context. As a first step, we focus essentially on the logical aspect of query optimization. In this paper, we propose a formalism (i) that unifies different rewriting formalisms, (ii) that allows easy and exhaustive factorization of duplicated subqueries, and (iii) that supports heuristics in order to rednce the optimization rewriting phase.