As schema languages for RDF data become more mature, we are seeing efforts to extend them with recursive semantics, applying diverse ideas from logic programming and description logics. While ShEx has an official recursive semantics based on greatest fixpoints (GFP), the discussion for SHACL is ongoing and seems to be converging towards least fixpoints (LFP). A practical study we perform shows that, indeed, ShEx validators implement GFP, whereas SHACL validators are more heterogeneous. This situation creates tension between ShEx and SHACL, as their semantic commitments appear to diverge, potentially undermining interoperability and predictability. We aim to clarify this design space by comparing the main semantic options in a principled yet accessible way, hoping to engage both theoreticians and practicioners, especially those involved in developing tools and standards. We present a unifying formal semantics that treats LFP, GFP, and supported model semantics (SMS), clarifying their relationships and highlighting a duality between LFP and GFP on stratified fragments. Next, we investigate to which extent the directions taken by SHACL and ShEx are compatible. We show that, although ShEx and SHACL seem to be going in different directions, they include large fragments with identical expressive power. Moreover, there is a strong correspondence between these fragments through the aforementioned principle of duality. Finally, we present a complete picture of the data and combined complexity of ShEx and SHACL validation under LFP, GFP, and SMS, showing that SMS comes at a higher computational cost under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions.

SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) expresses constraints on RDF data by means of so-called shapes. The central service is validation: verifying whether a data graph complies with a SHACL specification, but there are no static analysis services to compare specifications. In this paper, we study the following problem: decide whether all graphs that validate one SHACL document also validate another. Unlike previous works that have considered the implication of shape expressions only, we consider specifications comprising shape definitions and targets. We show that containment is undecidable under the supported and the stable model semantics, even for the fragment that uses the description logic ALCIO for shape expressions. Under the well-founded semantics, in contrast, it is decidable in single exponential time. Our key technical contributions are a translation of SHACL under well-founded semantics into the full hybrid mu-calculus, revealing a novel link between shape validation and fixed point modal logic, and a worst-case optimal automata-based decision procedure.

Description Logics (DLs) excel at representing structured knowledge in several application domains, but fall very short when it comes to reasoning about their numeric aspects. We consider the expressive DL ALCHOIQ with closed predicates and extend it with features ranging over user-specified finite numeric intervals, feature assertions, and local additive constraints on feature values. We illustrate the power of this language for describing problems that involve ontological and numeric reasoning and study reasoning problems that go beyond satisfiability, such as finding models that minimize some costs. We show that these additional numeric modeling and reasoning capabilities can be accommodated by extending a standard reasoning technique for ALCHOIQ using linear inequalities, and the extension does not necessarily increase the worst-case computational cost.

Reasoning with minimal models has always been at the core of many knowledge representation techniques, but we still have only a limited understanding of this problem in Description Logics (DLs). Minimization of some selected predicates---letting the remaining predicates vary or be fixed, as proposed in circumscription---has been explored and exhibits high complexity. The case of `pure' minimal models, where the extension of all predicates must be minimal, has remained largely uncharted. We address this problem in popular DLs and obtain surprisingly negative results: concept satisfiability in minimal models is undecidable already for EL. This undecidability also extends to a very restricted fragment of tuple-generating dependencies. To regain decidability, we impose acyclicity conditions on the TBox that bring the worst-case complexity below double exponential time and allow us to establish a connection with the recently studied pointwise circumscription; we also derive results in data complexity. We conclude with a brief excursion to the DL-Lite family, where a positive result was known for DL-Lite_core, but our investigation establishes ExpSpace-hardness already for its extension DL-Lite_horn.

Graphs have emerged as a foundation for a variety of applications, including capturing factual knowledge, semantic data integration, social networks, and informing machine learning algorithms. Formalising properties of the data and ensuring data quality requires describing schemas of such graphs. Driven by diverse applications, the Semantic Web and database communities developed not only different graph data models-RDF and property graphs-but also different graph schema languages-SHACL, ShEx, and PG-Schema. Each language has its unique approach to defining constraints and validating graph data, leaving potential users in the dark about their commonalities and differences. In this paper, we provide concise formal definitions of the core components of these languages, employ a uniform framework to facilitate a comprehensive comparison between them, and identify a common set of functionalities, shedding light on both overlapping and distinctive features.

This paper studies a stable model semantics for Description Logic (DL) knowledge bases (KBs) and for (possibly cyclic) terminologies, ultimately showing that terminologies under the proposed semantics can be equipped with effective reasoning algorithms. The semantics is derived using Quantified Equilibrium Logic, and---in contrast to the usual semantics of DLs based on classical logic---supports default negation and allows to combine the open-world and the closed-world assumptions in a natural way. Towards understanding the computational properties of this and related formalisms, we show a strong undecidability result that applies not only to KBs under the stable model semantics, but also to the more basic setting of minimal model reasoning. Specifically, we show that concept satisfiability in minimal models of an ALCIO KB is undecidable. We then turn our attention to (possibly cyclic) DL terminologies, where ontological axioms are limited to definitions of concept names in terms of complex concepts. This restriction still yields a very rich setting. We show that standard reasoning problems, like concept satisfiability and subsumption, are ExpTime-complete for terminologies expressed in ALCI under the stable model semantics.

Recently, Equilibrium Description Logics (EDLs) have been suggested as a promising new approach to Description Logics (DLs) with non-monotonic default negation. However, a deeper understanding of EDLs in terms of computational complexity and relations to other formalisms is still missing. Motivated by this, in this paper we investigate the computational complexity of reasoning in EDLs both in the case of expressive DLs like ALCIO and lightweight DLs in the EL and DL-Lite families. We establish a translation on EDLs into DLs with circumscription, introducing an extension of circumscribed DLs where a further set of axioms is attached to circumscribed KBs to filter out unintended minimal models. Such translation not only applies in the case of classical circumscription but can be extended to the recently introduced pointwise circumscribed DLs. We introduce pointwise EDLs where the single global minimality check on models is replaced by local minimality checks at the single domain elements in the style of pointwise circumscription. We provide preliminary results on the computational complexity of reasoning in pointwise EDLs. In particular, via the translation into pointwise circumscription, we inherit the decidability results of pointwise circumscribed DLs. Furthermore, we show that for a large class of acyclic ontologies EDLs and pointwise EDLs accept the same set of stable models. To this aim, we identify a class of ontologies where circumscription and pointwise circumscription accept the same set of minimal models, providing new decidability results for circumscribed DLs even in the presence of minimized and fixed roles.

W3C has recently introduced SHACL as a new standard for writing integrity constraints on graph-structured data (specifically, on RDF graphs). Unfortunately, the standard defines the semantics of non-recursive constraints only, leaving the case of recursive constraints open. This has spurred recent research efforts into finding a suitable, mathematically crisp semantics for constraints with cyclic dependencies. In this paper, we argue that recursive SHACL can be naturally equipped with a semantics inspired in the well-founded semantics for recursive logic programs with default negation. This semantics is not only intuitive, but it is also computationally tractable, unlike the previous proposals. The semantics is tolerant to constraint violations that are outside the realm of the so-called validation targets, which is a feature that is highly relevant in practice. In addition to defining the well-founded semantics using a notion of unfounded sets, we draw a connection to the classic definition of the well-founded semantics in logic programming: we provide a simple (yet inefficient) translation of recursive SHACL under the well-founded semantics into propositional logic programs under the well-founded semantics. This translation also provides a basis for a highly optimized SHACL validation engine, which we also present in this paper. Our system performs graph validation by producing a optimized logic program that can be evaluated using the DLV deductive database engine. The system has pay-as-you-go behavior: for validation with non-recursive constraints, the system avoids using a deductive database and instead only uses SPARQL queries over a RDF triplestore.

We study the relative expressiveness of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) formulated in the expressive Description Logic ALCHOIQ extended with closed predicates. In particular, we present a polynomial time translation from OMQs into Datalog with negation under the stable model semantics, the formalism that underlies Answer Set Programming. This is a novel and non-trivial result: the considered OMQs are not only non-monotonic, but also feature a tricky combination of nominals, inverse roles, and counting. We start with atomic queries and then lift our approach to a large class of first-order queries where quantification is “guarded” by closed predicates. Our translation is based on a characterization of the query answering problem via integer programming, and a specially crafted program in Datalog with negation that finds solutions to dynamically generated systems of integer inequalities. As an important by-product of our translation we get that the query answering problem is co-NP-complete in data complexity for the considered class of OMQs. Thus, answering these OMQs in the presence of closed predicates is not harder than answering them in the standard setting. This is not obvious as closed predicates are known to increase data complexity for some existing ontology languages.

OWL and SHACL are two prominent W3C standards for managing RDF graphs, the data model of the Web. They are used for different purposes and make different assumptions about the completeness of data: SHACL is used for expressing integrity constraints on complete data, while OWL allows inferring implicit facts from incomplete data; SHACL reasoners perform validation, while OWL reasoners do logical inference. Integrating these two tasks into one uniform approach is a relevant but challenging problem. The SHACL standard envisions graph validation in combination with OWL entailment, but it does not provide technical guidance on how to realize this. To address this problem, we propose a new intuitive semantics for validating SHACL constraints with OWL 2 QL ontologies based on a suitable notion of the chase. We propose an algorithm that rewrites a set of recursive SHACL constraints (with stratified negation) and an OWL 2 QL ontology into a stand-alone set of SHACL constraints that preserves validation for every input graph, which can in turn be evaluated using an off-the-shelf SHACL validator. We show that validation in this setting is EXPTIME-complete in combined complexity, but only PTIME-complete in data complexity, i.e., if the constraints and the ontology are fixed.

Circumscription is one of the most powerful ways to extend Description Logics (DLs) with non-monotonic reasoning features, albeit with huge computational costs and undecidability in many cases. In this paper, we introduce pointwise circumscription for DLs, which is not only intuitive in terms of knowledge representation, but also provides a sound approximation of classic circumscription and has reduced computational complexity. Our main idea is to replace the second-order quantification step of classic circumscription with a series of (pointwise) local checks on all domain elements and their immediate neighbourhood. Our main positive results are for ontologies in DLs ALCIO and ALCI: we prove that for TBoxes of modal depth 1 (i.e. without nesting of existential or universal quantifiers) standard reasoning problems under pointwise circumscription are (co)NExpTime-complete and ExpTime-complete, respectively. The restriction of modal depth still yields a large class of ontologies useful in practice, and it is further justified by a strong undecidability result for pointwise circumscription with general TBoxes in ALCIO.

A key prerequisite for the successful adoption of the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL)---the W3C standardized constraint language for RDF graphs---is the availability of automated tools that efficiently validate targeted constraints (known as shapes graphs ) over possibly very large RDF graphs. There are already significant efforts to produce optimized engines for SHACL validation, but they focus on restricted fragments of SHACL. For unrestricted SHACL, that is SHACL with unrestricted recursion and negation, there is no validator beyond a proof-of-concept prototype, and existing techniques are inherently incompatible with the goal-driven approaches being pursued by existing validators. Instead they require a global computation on the entire data graph that is not only computationally very costly, but also brittle, and can easily result in validation failures due to conflicts that are irrelevant to the validation targets. To address these challenges, we present a 'magic' transformation---based on Magic Sets as known from Logic Programming---that transforms a SHACL shapes graph S into a new shapes graph S' whose validation considers only the relevant neighbourhood of the targeted nodes. The new S' is equivalent to S whenever there are no conflicts between the constraints and the data, and in case the validation of S fails due to conflicts that are irrelevant to the target, S' may still admit a lazy, target-oriented validation. We implement the algorithm and run preliminary experiments, showing our approach can be a stepping stone towards validators for full SHACL, and that it can significantly improve the performance of the only prototype validator that currently supports full recursion and negation.

Description Logics (DLs) support so-called anonymous objects, which significantly contribute to the expressiveness of these KR languages, but also cause substantial computational challenges. This paper investigates reasoning about upper bounds on predicate sizes for ontologies written in the expressive DL ALCHOIQ extended with closed predicates. We describe a procedure based on integer programming that allows us to decide the existence of upper bounds on the cardinality of some predicate in the models of a given ontology in a data-independent way. Our results yield a promising supporting tool for constructing higher quality ontologies, and provide a new way to push the decidability frontiers. To wit, we define a new safety condition for Datalog-based queries over DL ontologies, while retaining decidability of query entailment.

The Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) is a recently standardized language for describing and validating constraints over RDF graphs. The SHACL specification describes the so-called validation reports, which are meant to explain to the users the outcome of validating an RDF graph against a collection of constraints. Specifically, explaining the reasons why the input graph does not satisfy the constraints is challenging. In fact, the current SHACL standard leaves it open on how such explanations can be provided to the users. In this paper, inspired by works on logic-based abduction and database repairs, we study the problem of explaining non-validation of SHACL constraints. In particular, in our framework non-validation is explained using the notion of a repair, i.e., a collection of additions and deletions whose application on an input graph results in a repaired graph that does satisfy the given SHACL constraints. We define a collection of decision problems for reasoning about explanations, possibly restricting to explanations that are minimal with respect to cardinality or set inclusion. We provide a detailed characterization of the computational complexity of those reasoning tasks, including the combined and the data complexity.

Among many solutions for extracting useful answers from incomplete data, ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) use domain knowledge to infer missing facts. We propose an extension of OMQs that allows us to make certain assumptions—for example, about parts of the data that may be unavailable at query time, or costly to query—and retrieve conditional answers, that is, tuples that become certain query answers when the assumptions hold. We show that querying in this powerful formalism often has no higher worst-case complexity than in plain OMQs, and that these queries are first-order rewritable for DL-Liteℛ. Rewritability is preserved even if we allow some use of closed predicates to combine the (partial) closed- and open-world assumptions. This is remarkable, as closed predicates are a very useful extension of OMQs, but they usually make query answering intractable in data complexity, even in very restricted settings.

We introduce resilient logic programs (RLPs) that couple a non-monotonic logic program and a first-order (FO) theory or description logic (DL) ontology. Unlike previous hybrid languages, where the interaction between the program and the theory is limited to consistency or query entailment tests, in RLPs answer sets must be ‘resilient’ to the models of the theory, allowing non-output predicates of the program to respond differently to different models. RLPs can elegantly express ∃∀∃-QBFs, disjunctive ASP, and configuration problems under incompleteness of information. RLPs are decidable when a couple of natural assumptions are made: (i) satisfiability of FO theories in the presence of closed predicates is decidable, and (ii) rules are safe in the style of the well-known DL-safeness. We further show that a large fragment of such RLPs can be translated into standard (disjunctive) ASP, for which efficient implementations exist. For RLPs with theories expressed in DLs, we use a novel relaxation of safeness that safeguards rules via predicates whose extensions can be inferred to have a finite bound. We present several complexity results for the case where ontologies are written in some standard DLs.

We propose a novel use of ontologies to aid the ondemand design of data-centric systems. By means of a process that we call focusing, a schema for a (possibly knowledge-enriched) database can be obtained semi-automatically from an existing ontology and a specification of the scope of the desired system.We formalize the inputs and outputs of focusing, and identify relevant computational problems: finding a schema via focusing, testing its consistency, and answering queries in the knowledge-enriched databases it produces. These definitions are independent from the ontology language. We then study focusing for selected description logics as ontology languages, and popular classes of queries for specifying the scope of the system. For several representative combinations, we study the decidability and complexity of the identified computational problems. As a by-product, we isolate (and solve) mixed variants of the classical satisfiability and entailment problems, where selected predicates are required to have finite extension, as well as the nullability problem, which is closely related to query emptiness.

We study the relative expressiveness of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) formulated in the expressive Description Logic ALCHOIF extended with closed predicates. In particular, we present a polynomial-time translation from OMQs into Datalog with negation under the stable model semantics, the formalism that underlies Answer Set Programming. This is a novel and non-trivial result: the considered OMQs are not only non-monotonic but also feature a tricky combination of nominals, inverse roles, and role functionality. We start with atomic queries and then lift our approach to a large class of first-order queries where quantification is “guarded” by closed predicates. Our translation is based on a characterization of the query answering problem via integer programming, and a specially crafted program in Datalog with negation that finds solutions to dynamically generated systems of integer inequalities. As an important by-product of our translation, we get that the query answering problem is co-NP-complete in data complexity for the considered class of OMQs. Thus, answering these OMQs in the presence of closed predicates is not harder than answering them in the standard setting. This is not obvious as closed predicates are known to increase data complexity for some existing ontology languages.

Concrete domains, especially those that allow to compare features with numeric values, have long been recognized as a very desirable extension of description logics (DLs), and significant efforts have been invested into adding them to usual DLs while keeping the complexity of reasoning in check. For expressive DLs and in the presence of general TBoxes, for standard reasoning tasks like consistency, the most general decidability results are for the so-called ω-admissible domains, which are required to be dense. Supporting non-dense domains for features that range over integers or natural numbers remained largely open, despite often being singled out as a highly desirable extension. The decidability of some extensions of ALC with non-dense domains has been shown, but existing results rely on powerful machinery that does not allow to infer any elementary bounds on the complexity of the problem. In this paper, we study an extension of ALC with a rich integer domain that allows for comparisons (between features, and between features and constants coded in unary), and prove that consistency can be solved using automata-theoretic techniques in single exponential time, and thus has no higher worst-case complexity than standard ALC. Our upper bounds apply to some extensions of DLs with concrete domains known from the literature, support general TBoxes, and allow for comparing values along paths of ordinary (not necessarily functional) roles.

SHACL (SHape Constraint Language) is a W3C recommendation for validating graph-based data against a set of constraints (called shapes). Importantly, SHACL allows to define recursive shapes, i.e. a shape may refer to itself, directly of indirectly. The recommendation left open the semantics of recursive shapes, but proposals have emerged recently to extend the official semantics to support recursion. These proposals are based on the principle of possibility (or non-contradiction): a graph is considered valid against a schema if one can assign shapes to nodes in such a way that all constraints are satisfied. This semantics is not constructive, as it does not provide guidelines about how to obtain such an assignment, and it may lead to unfounded assignments, where the only reason to assign a shape to a node is that it allows validating the graph.

We advocate the use of ontologies for relaxing and restraining queries, so that they retrieve either more or less answers, enabling the exploration of a given dataset. We propose a set of rewriting rules to relax and restrain conjunctive queries (CQs) over datasets mediated by an ontology written in a dialect of DL-Lite with complex role inclusions (CRIs). The addition of CRI enables the representation of knowledge about data involving ordered hierarchies of categories, in the style of multi-dimensional data models. Although CRIs in general destroy the first-order rewritability of CQs, we identify settings in which CQs remain rewritable.

We propose Clopen Knowledge Bases (CKBs) as a new formalism combining Answer Set Programming (ASP) with ontology languages based on first-order logic. CKBs generalize the prominent r-hybrid and DL+LOG languages of Rosati, and are more flexible for specification of problems that combine open-world and closed-world reasoning. We argue that the guarded negation fragment of first-order logic(GNFO)—a very expressive fragment that subsumes many prominent ontology languages like Description Logics (DLs) and the guarded fragment—is an ontology language that can be used in CKBs while enjoying decidability for basic reasoning problems. We further show how CKBs can be used with expressive DLs of the ALC family, and obtain worst-case optimal complexity results in this setting. For DL-based CKBs, we define a fragment called separable CKBs (which still strictly subsumes r-hybrid and DL+LOG knowledge bases), and show that they can be rather efficiently translated into standard ASP programs. This approach allows us to perform basic inference from separable CKBs by reusing existing efficient ASP solvers. We have implemented the approach for separable CKBs containing ontologies in the DL ALCH, and present in this paper some promising empirical results for real-life data. They show that our approach provides a dramatic improvement over a naive implementation based on a translation of such CKBs into dl-programs.

The goal of this paper is to understand the relative expressiveness of the query language in which queries are specified by a set of guarded (disjunctive) tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and an output (or 'answer') predicate. Our main result is to show that every such query can be translated into a polynomially-sized (disjunctive) Datalog program if the maximal number of variables in the (disjunctive) TGDs is bounded by a constant. To overcome the challenge that Datalog has no direct means to express the existential quantification present in TGDs, we define a two-player game that characterizes the satisfaction of the dependencies, and design a Datalog query that can decide the existence of a winning strategy for the game. For guarded disjunctive TGDs, we can obtain Datalog rules with disjunction in the heads. However, the use of disjunction is limited, and the resulting rules fall into a fragment that can be evaluated in deterministic single exponential time. We proceed quite differently for the case when the TGDs are not disjunctive and we show that we can obtain a plain Datalog query. Notably, unlike previous translations for related fragments, our translation requires only polynomial time if the maximal number of variables in the (disjunctive) TGDs is bounded by a constant.

Answering ontology mediated queries (OMQs) has received much attention in the last decade, but the big gap between practicable algorithms for lightweight ontologies, that are supported by implemented reasoners, and purely theoretical algorithms for expressive ontologies that are not amenable to implementation, has only increased. Towards narrowing the gap, we propose an algorithm to compile a representation of sets of models for ALCHI ontologies, which is sufficient for answering any monotone OMQ. Rather than reasoning for specific ABoxes, or being fully data-independent, we use generic descriptions of families of ABoxes, given by what we call profiles. Our model compilation algorithm runs on TBoxes and sets of profiles, and supports the incremental addition of new profiles. To illustrate the potential of our approach for OMQ answering, we implement a rewriting into an extension of Datalog for OMQs comprising reachability queries, and provide some promising evaluation results.

Past research into decidable fragments of first-order logic (FO) has produced two very prominent fragments: the guarded fragment GF, and the two-variable fragment FO2. These fragments are of crucial importance because they provide significant insights into decidabil- ity and expressiveness of other (computational) logics like Modal Logics (MLs) and various Description Logics (DLs), which play a central role in Verification, Knowledge Represen- tation, and other areas. In this paper, we take a closer look at GF and FO2, and present a new fragment that subsumes them both. This fragment, called the triguarded fragment (denoted TGF), is obtained by relaxing the standard definition of GF: quantification is required to be guarded only for subformulae with three or more free variables. We show that, in the absence of equality, satisfiability in TGF is N2ExpTime-complete, but becomes NExpTime-complete if we bound the arity of predicates by a constant (a natural assumption in the context of MLs and DLs). Finally, we observe that many natural extensions of TGF, including the addition of equality, lead to undecidability.

It is realistic to assume that a database management system provides access to the active domain via built-in relations. Therefore, databases that include designated predicates that hold the active domain, which we call product databases, form a natural notion that deserves our attention. An import ant issue then is to look at the consequences of product databases for the expressiveness and complexity of central existential rule languages. We focus on guarded-based existential rules, and we investigate the impact of product databases on their expressive power and complexity. We show that the queries expressed via (frontier-)guarded rules gain in expressiveness, and in fact, they have the same expressive power as Datalog. On the other hand, there is no impact on the expressiveness of the queries specified via weakly-(frontier-)guarded rules since they are powerful enough to explicitly compute the predicates needed to access the active domain. We also observe that there is no impact on the complexity of the query languages in question.

In this article, we consider the setting of graph-structured data that evolves as a result of operations carried out by users or applications. We study different reasoning problems, which range from deciding whether a given sequence of actions preserves the satisfaction of a given set of integrity constraints, for every possible initial data instance, to deciding the (non)existence of a sequence of actions that would take the data to an (un)desirable state, starting either from a specific data instance or from an incomplete description of it. For describing states of the data instances and expressing integrity constraints on them, we use description logics (DLs) closely related to the two-variable fragment of first-order logic with counting quantifiers. The updates are defined as actions in a simple yet flexible language, as finite sequences of conditional insertions and deletions, which allow one to use complex DL formulas to select the (pairs of) nodes for which (node or arc) labels are added or deleted. We formalize the preceding data management problems as a static verification problem and several planning problems and show that, due to the adequate choice of formalisms for describing actions and states of the data, most of these data management problems can be effectively reduced to the (un)satisfiability of suitable formulas in decidable logical formalisms. Leveraging this, we provide algorithms and tight complexity bounds for the formalized problems, both for expressive DLs and for a variant of the popular DL-Lite, advocated for data management in recent years.

Integrity constraints play a central role in databases and, among other applications, are fundamental for preserving data integrity when databases evolve as a result of operations manipulating the data. In this context, an important task is that of static verification, which consists in deciding whether a given set of constraints is preserved after the execution of a given sequence of operations, for every possible database satisfying the initial constraints. In this paper, we consider constraints over graph-structured data formulated in an expressive Description Logic (DL) that allows for regular expressions over binary relations and their inverses, generalizing many of the well-known path constraint languages proposed for semi-structured data in the last two decades. In this setting, we study the problem of static verification, for operations expressed in a simple yet flexible language built from additions and deletions of complex DL expressions. We establish undecidability of the general setting, and identify suitable restricted fragments for which we obtain tight complexity results, building on techniques developed in our previous work for simpler DLs. As a by-product, we obtain new (un)decidability results for the implication problem of path constraints, and improve previous upper bounds on the complexity of the problem.

We study the description logic ALCQIO, which extends the standard description logic ALC with nominals, inverses and counting quantifiers. ALCQIO is a fragment of first order logic and thus cannot define trees. We consider the satisfiability problem of ALCQIO over finite structures in which k relations are interpreted as forests of directed trees with unbounded out degrees. We show that the finite satisfiability problem of ALCQIO with forests is polynomial-time reducible to finite satisfiability of ALCQIO. As a consequence, we get that finite satisfiability is NEXPTIME-complete. Description logics with transitive closure constructors or fixed points have been studied before, but we give the first decidability result of the finite satisfiability problem for a description logic that contains nominals, inverse roles, and counting quantifiers and can define trees.

SPARQL entailment regimes are strongly influenced by the big body of works on ontology-based query answering, notably in the area of Description Logics (DLs). However, the semantics of query answering under SPARQL entailment regimes is defined in a more naive and much less expressive way than the certain answer semantics usually adopted in DLs. The goal of this work is to introduce an intuitive certain answer semantics also for SPARQL and to show the feasibility of this approach. For OWL 2 QL entailment, we present algorithms for the evaluation of an interesting fragment of SPARQL (the so-called well-designed SPARQL). Moreover, we show that the complexity of the most fundamental query analysis tasks (such as query containment and equivalence testing) is not negatively affected by the presence of OWL 2 QL entailment under the proposed semantics.

Conjunctive regular path queries are an expressive extension of the well-known class of conjunctive queries. Such queries have been extensively studied in the (graph) database community, since they support a controlled form of recursion and enable sophisticated path navigation. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been little work aimed at using such queries in the context of description logic (DL) knowledge bases, particularly for the lightweight DLs that are considered best suited for data-intensive applications. This paper aims to bridge this gap by providing algorithms and tight complexity bounds for answering two-way conjunctive regular path queries over DL knowledge bases formulated in lightweight DLs of the DL-Lite and EL families. Our results demonstrate that in data complexity, the cost of moving to this richer query language is as low as one could wish for: the problem is NL-complete for DL-Lite and P-complete for EL. The combined complexity of query answering increases from NP- to PSpace-complete, but for two-way regular path queries (without conjunction), we show that query answering is tractable even with respect to combined complexity. Our results reveal two-way conjunctive regular path queries as a promising language for querying data enriched by ontologies formulated in DLs of the DL-Lite and EL families or the corresponding OWL 2 QL and EL profiles.

In this paper we consider the setting of graph-structured data that evolves as a result of operations carried out by users or applications. We study different reasoning problems, which range from ensuring the satisfaction of a given set of integrity constraints after a given sequence of updates, to deciding the (non-)existence of a sequence of actions that would take the data to an (un)desirable state, starting either from a specific data instance or from an incomplete description of it. We consider a simple action language in which actions are finite sequences of insertions and deletions of nodes and labels, and use Description Logics for describing integrity constraints and (partial) states of the data. We then formalize the data management problems mentioned above as a static verification problem and several planning problems. We provide algorithms and tight complexity bounds for the formalized problems, both for an expressive DL and for a variant of DL-Lite.

Mapping relational data to RDF is an important task for the development of the Semantic Web. To this end, the W3C has recently released a Recommendation for the so-called direct mapping of relational data to RDF. In this work, we propose an enrichment of the direct mapping to make it more faithful by transferring also semantic information present in the relational schema from the relational world to the RDF world. We thus introduce expressive identification constraints to capture functional dependencies and define an RDF Normal Form, which precisely captures the classical Boyce-Codd Normal Form of relational schemas.

The so-called existential rules have recently gained attention, mainly due to their adequate expressiveness for ontological query answering. Several decidable fragments of such rules have been introduced, employing restriction such as various forms of guardedness to ensure decidability. Some of the more well-known languages in this arena are (weakly) guarded and (weakly) frontier-guarded fragments of existential rules. In this paper, we explore their relative and absolute expressiveness. In particular, we provide a new proof that queries expressed via frontier-guarded and guarded rules can be translated into plain Datalog queries. Since the converse translations are impossible, we develop generalizations of frontier-guarded and guarded rules to nearly frontier-guarded and nearly guarded rules, respectively, which have exactly the expressive power of Datalog. We further show that weakly frontier-guarded rules can be translated into weakly guarded rules, and thus, weakly frontier-guarded and weakly guarded rules have exactly the same expressive power. Such rules cannot be translated into Datalog since their query answering problem is ExpTime-complete in data complexity. We strengthen this result by showing that on ordered databases and with input negation available, weakly guarded rules capture all queries decidable in exponential time. We then show that weakly guarded rules extended with stratified negation are expressive enough to capture all database queries decidable in exponential time, without any assumptions about input databases. Finally, we note that the translations of this paper are, in general, exponential in size, but lead to worst-case optimal algorithms for query answering with considered languages.

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.

Query answering over Description Logic (DL) ontologies has become a vibrant field of research. Efficient realizations often exploit database technology and rewrite a given query to an equivalent SQL or Datalog query over a database associated with the ontology. This approach has been intensively studied for conjunctive query answering in the DL-Lite and EL families, but is much less explored for more expressive DLs and queries. We present a rewriting-based algorithm for conjunctive query answering over Horn-SHIQ ontologies, possibly extended with recursive rules under limited recursion as in DL+log. This setting not only subsumes both DL-Lite and EL, but also yields an algorithm for answering (limited) recursive queries over Horn-SHIQ ontologies (an undecidable problem for full recursive queries). A prototype implementation shows its potential for applications, as experiments exhibit efficient query answering over full Horn-SHIQ ontologies and benign downscaling to DL-Lite, where it is competitive with comparable state of the art systems.

Query containment has been studied extensively in KR and databases, for different kinds of query languages and domain constraints. We address the longstanding open problem of containment under expressive description logic (DL) constraints for two-way regular path queries (2RPQs) and their conjunctions, which generalize conjunctive queries with the ability to express regular navigation. We show that, surprisingly, functionality constraints alone make containment of 2RPQs already EXPTIME-hard. By employing automata-theoretic techniques, we also provide a matching upper bound that extends to very expressive DL constraints. For conjunctive 2RPQs we prove a further exponential jump in complexity, and provide again a matching upper bound for expressive DLs. Our techniques provide also a solution to the problem of query entailment over DL knowledge bases in which individuals in the ABox may be related through regular role-paths.

The high computational complexity of the expressive Description Logics (DLs) that underlie the OWL standard has motivated the study of their Horn fragments, which are usually tractable in data complexity and can also have lower combined complexity, particularly for query answering. In this paper we provide algorithms for answering conjunctive 2-way regular path queries (2CRPQs), a nontrivial generalization of plain conjunctive queries, in the Horn fragments of the DLs SHOIQ and SROIQ underlying OWL 1 and OWL 2. We show that the combined complexity of the problem is ExpTime-complete for Horn-SHOIQ and 2ExpTimecomplete for the more expressive Horn-SROIQ, butisPTime-complete in data complexity for both. In contrast, even decidability of plain conjunctive queries is still open for full SHOIQ and SROIQ. These are the first completeness results for query answering in DLs with inverses, nominals, and counting, and show that for the considered logics the problem is not more expensive than standard reasoning.

We present the class FDNC of logic programs that allows for function symbols (F), disjunction (D), nonmonotonic negation under the answer set semantics (N), and constraints (C), while still retaining the decidability of the standard reasoning tasks. Thanks to these features, FDNC programs are a powerful formalism for rule-based modeling of applications with potentially infinite processes and objects, and which allows also for common-sense reasoning in this context. This is evidenced, for instance, by tasks in reasoning about actions and planning: brave and open queries over FDNC programs capture the well-known problems of plan existence and secure (conformant) plan existence, respectively, in transition-based actions domains. As for reasoning from FDNC programs, we show that consistency checking and brave/cautious reasoning tasks are ExpTime-complete in general, but have lower complexity under syntactic restrictions that give rise to a family of program classes. Furthermore, we also determine the complexity of open queries (i.e., with answer variables), for which deciding non-empty answers is shown to be ExpSpace -complete under cautious entailment. Furthermore, we present algorithms for all reasoning tasks that are worst-case optimal. The majority of them resorts to a finite representation of the stable models of an FDNC program that employs maximal founded sets of knots, which are labeled trees of depth at most 1 from which each stable model can be reconstructed. Due to this property, reasoning over FDNC programs can in many cases be reduced to reasoning from knots. Once the knot-representation for a program is derived (which can be done off-line), several reasoning tasks are not more expensive than in the function-free case, and some are even feasible in polynomial time. This knowledge compilation technique paves the way to potentially more efficient online reasoning methods not only for FDNC, but also for other formalisms.