Distributed Reasoning in a Peer-to-Peer Setting: Application to the Semantic Web

In a peer-to-peer inference system, each peer can reason locally but can also solicit some of its acquaintances, which are peers sharing part of its vocabulary. In this paper, we consider peer-to-peer inference systems in which the local theory of each peer is a set of propositional clauses defined upon a local vocabulary. An important characteristic of peer-to-peer inference systems is that the global theory (the union of all peer theories) is not known (as opposed to partition-based reasoning systems). The main contribution of this paper is to provide the first consequence finding algorithm in a peer-to-peer setting: DeCA. It is anytime and computes consequences gradually from the solicited peer to peers that are more and more distant. We exhibit a sufficient condition on the acquaintance graph of the peer-to-peer inference system for guaranteeing the completeness of this algorithm. Another important contribution is to apply this general distributed reasoning setting to the setting of the Semantic Web through the Somewhere semantic peer-to-peer data management system. The last contribution of this paper is to provide an experimental analysis of the scalability of the peer-to-peer infrastructure that we propose, on large networks of 1000 peers

Trading inference effort versus size in CNF Knowledge Compilation

Knowledge Compilation (KC) studies compilation of boolean functions f into some formalism F, which allows to answer all queries of a certain kind in polynomial time. Due to its relevance for SAT solving, we concentrate on the query type "clausal entailment" (CE), i.e., whether a clause C follows from f or not, and we consider subclasses of CNF, i.e., clause-sets F with special properties. In this report we do not allow auxiliary variables (except of the Outlook), and thus F needs to be equivalent to f. We consider the hierarchies UC_k <= WC_k, which were introduced by the authors in 2012. Each level allows CE queries. The first two levels are well-known classes for KC. Namely UC_0 = WC_0 is the same as PI as studied in KC, that is, f is represented by the set of all prime implicates, while UC_1 = WC_1 is the same as UC, the class of unit-refutation complete clause-sets introduced by del Val 1994. We show that for each k there are (sequences of) boolean functions with polysize representations in UC_{k+1}, but with an exponential lower bound on representations in WC_k. Such a separation was previously only know for k=0. We also consider PC < UC, the class of propagation-complete clause-sets. We show that there are (sequences of) boolean functions with polysize representations in UC, while there is an exponential lower bound for representations in PC. These separations are steps towards a general conjecture determining the representation power of the hierarchies PC_k < UC_k <= WC_k. The strong form of this conjecture also allows auxiliary variables, as discussed in depth in the Outlook.Comment: 43 pages, second version with literature updates. Proceeds with the separation results from the discontinued arXiv:1302.442