arXiv subjects

Diego Calvanese

Publications and source records attributed to Diego Calvanese.

45 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

Reasoning about Explanations for Negative Query Answers in DL-Lite

In order to meet usability requirements, most logic-based applications provide explanation facilities for reasoning services. This holds also for Description Logics, where research has focused on the explanation of both TBox reasoning and, more recently, query answering. Besides explaining the presence of a tuple in a query answer, it is important to explain also why a given tuple is missing. We address the latter problem for instance and conjunctive query answering over DL-Lite ontologies by adopting abductive reasoning; that is, we look for additions to the ABox that force a given tuple to be in the result. As reasoning tasks we consider existence and recognition of an explanation, and relevance and necessity of a given assertion for an explanation. We characterize the computational complexity of these problems for arbitrary, subset minimal, and cardinality minimal explanations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2014

The DL-Lite Family and Relations

The recently introduced series of description logics under the common moniker DL-Lite has attracted attention of the description logic and semantic web communities due to the low computational complexity of inference, on the one hand, and the ability to represent conceptual modeling formalisms, on the other. The main aim of this article is to carry out a thorough and systematic investigation of inference in extensions of the original DL-Lite logics along five axes: by (i) adding the Boolean connectives and (ii) number restrictions to concept constructs, (iii) allowing role hierarchies, (iv) allowing role disjointness, symmetry, asymmetry, reflexivity, irreflexivity and transitivity constraints, and (v) adopting or dropping the unique same assumption. We analyze the combined complexity of satisfiability for the resulting logics, as well as the data complexity of instance checking and answering positive existential queries. Our approach is based on embedding DL-Lite logics in suitable fragments of the one-variable first-order logic, which provides useful insights into their properties and, in particular, computational behavior.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2013

Verification of Semantically-Enhanced Artifact Systems (Extended Version)

Artifact-Centric systems have emerged in the last years as a suitable framework to model business-relevant entities, by combining their static and dynamic aspects. In particular, the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) approach has been recently proposed to model artifacts and their lifecycle in a declarative way. In this paper, we enhance GSM with a Semantic Layer, constituted by a full-fledged OWL 2 QL ontology linked to the artifact information models through mapping specifications. The ontology provides a conceptual view of the domain under study, and allows one to understand the evolution of the artifact system at a higher level of abstraction. In this setting, we present a technique to specify temporal properties expressed over the Semantic Layer, and verify them according to the evolution in the underlying GSM model. This technique has been implemented in a tool that exploits state-of-the-art ontology-based data access technologies to manipulate the temporal properties according to the ontology and the mappings, and that relies on the GSMC model checker for verification.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2013

Exchanging OWL 2 QL Knowledge Bases

Knowledge base exchange is an important problem in the area of data exchange and knowledge representation, where one is interested in exchanging information between a source and a target knowledge base connected through a mapping. In this paper, we study this fundamental problem for knowledge bases and mappings expressed in OWL 2 QL, the profile of OWL 2 based on the description logic DL-Lite_R. More specifically, we consider the problem of computing universal solutions, identified as one of the most desirable translations to be materialized, and the problem of computing UCQ-representations, which optimally capture in a target TBox the information that can be extracted from a source TBox and a mapping by means of unions of conjunctive queries. For the former we provide a novel automata-theoretic technique, and complexity results that range from NP to EXPTIME, while for the latter we show NLOGSPACE-completeness.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2013

Verification of Inconsistency-Aware Knowledge and Action Bases (Extended Version)

Description Logic Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) have been recently introduced as a mechanism that provides a semantically rich representation of the information on the domain of interest in terms of a DL KB and a set of actions to change such information over time, possibly introducing new objects. In this setting, decidability of verification of sophisticated temporal properties over KABs, expressed in a variant of first-order mu-calculus, has been shown. However, the established framework treats inconsistency in a simplistic way, by rejecting inconsistent states produced through action execution. We address this problem by showing how inconsistency handling based on the notion of repairs can be integrated into KABs, resorting to inconsistency-tolerant semantics. In this setting, we establish decidability and complexity of verification.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2012

Verification of Relational Data-Centric Dynamic Systems with External Services

Data-centric dynamic systems are systems where both the process controlling the dynamics and the manipulation of data are equally central. In this paper we study verification of (first-order) mu-calculus variants over relational data-centric dynamic systems, where data are represented by a full-fledged relational database, and the process is described in terms of atomic actions that evolve the database. The execution of such actions may involve calls to external services, providing fresh data inserted into the system. As a result such systems are typically infinite-state. We show that verification is undecidable in general, and we isolate notable cases, where decidability is achieved. Specifically we start by considering service calls that return values deterministically (depending only on passed parameters). We show that in a mu-calculus variant that preserves knowledge of objects appeared along a run we get decidability under the assumption that the fresh data introduced along a run are bounded, though they might not be bounded in the overall system. In fact we tie such a result to a notion related to weak acyclicity studied in data exchange. Then, we move to nondeterministic services where the assumption of data bounded run would result in a bound on the service calls that can be invoked during the execution and hence would be too restrictive. So we investigate decidability under the assumption that knowledge of objects is preserved only if they are continuously present. We show that if infinitely many values occur in a run but do not accumulate in the same state, then we get again decidability. We give syntactic conditions to avoid this accumulation through the novel notion of "generate-recall acyclicity", which takes into consideration that every service call activation generates new values that cannot be accumulated indefinitely.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2010

View Synthesis from Schema Mappings

In data management, and in particular in data integration, data exchange, query optimization, and data privacy, the notion of view plays a central role. In several contexts, such as data integration, data mashups, and data warehousing, the need arises of designing views starting from a set of known correspondences between queries over different schemas. In this paper we deal with the issue of automating such a design process. We call this novel problem "view synthesis from schema mappings": given a set of schema mappings, each relating a query over a source schema to a query over a target schema, automatically synthesize for each source a view over the target schema in such a way that for each mapping, the query over the source is a rewriting of the query over the target wrt the synthesized views. We study view synthesis from schema mappings both in the relational setting, where queries and views are (unions of) conjunctive queries, and in the semistructured data setting, where queries and views are (two-way) regular path queries, as well as unions of conjunctions thereof. We provide techniques and complexity upper bounds for each of these cases.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2005

Conjunctive Query Containment and Answering under Description Logics Constraints

Query containment and query answering are two important computational tasks in databases. While query answering amounts to compute the result of a query over a database, query containment is the problem of checking whether for every database, the result of one query is a subset of the result of another query. In this paper, we deal with unions of conjunctive queries, and we address query containment and query answering under Description Logic constraints. Every such constraint is essentially an inclusion dependencies between concepts and relations, and their expressive power is due to the possibility of using complex expressions, e.g., intersection and difference of relations, special forms of quantification, regular expressions over binary relations, in the specification of the dependencies. These types of constraints capture a great variety of data models, including the relational, the entity-relationship, and the object-oriented model, all extended with various forms of constraints, and also the basic features of the ontology languages used in the context of the Semantic Web. We present the following results on both query containment and query answering. We provide a method for query containment under Description Logic constraints, thus showing that the problem is decidable, and analyze its computational complexity. We prove that query containment is undecidable in the case where we allow inequalities in the right-hand side query, even for very simple constraints and queries. We show that query answering under Description Logic constraints can be reduced to query containment, and illustrate how such a reduction provides upper bound results with respect to both combined and data complexity.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2005

Data complexity of answering conjunctive queries over SHIQ knowledge bases

An algorithm for answering conjunctive queries over SHIQ knowledge bases that is coNP in data complexity is given. The algorithm is based on the tableau algorithm for reasoning with individuals in SHIQ. The blocking conditions of the tableau are weakened in such a way that the set of models the modified algorithm yields suffices to check query entailment. The modified blocking conditions are based on the ones proposed by Levy and Rousset for reasoning with Horn Rules in the description logic ALCNR.

cs.LO↗