An ontology specifies an abstract model of a domain of interest via a formal language that is typically based on logic. Although description logics are popular formalisms for modeling ontologies, tuplegenerating dependencies (tgds), originally introduced as a unifying framework for database integrity constraints, and later on used in data exchange and integration, are also well suited for modeling ontologies that are intended for data-intensive tasks. The reason is that, unlike description logics, tgds can easily handle higherarity relations that naturally occur in relational databases. In recent years, there has been an extensive study of tgd-ontologies and of their applications to several different data-intensive tasks. However, the fundamental question of whether the expressive power of tgd-ontologies can be characterized in terms of model-theoretic properties remains largely unexplored. We establish several characterizations of tgd-ontologies, including characterizations of ontologies specified by such central classes of tgds as full, linear, guarded, and frontier-guarded tgds. Our characterizations use the well-known notions of critical instance and direct product, as well as a novel locality property for tgd-ontologies. We further use this locality property to decide whether an ontology expressed by frontier-guarded (respectively, guarded) tgds can be expressed by tgds in the weaker class of guarded (respectively, linear) tgds, and effectively construct such an equivalent ontology if one exists.