Answering SPARQL queries modulo RDF Schema with paths

SPARQL is the standard query language for RDF graphs. In its strict instantiation, it only offers querying according to the RDF semantics and would thus ignore the semantics of data expressed with respect to (RDF) schemas or (OWL) ontologies. Several extensions to SPARQL have been proposed to query RDF data modulo RDFS, i.e., interpreting the query with RDFS semantics and/or considering external ontologies. We introduce a general framework which allows for expressing query answering modulo a particular semantics in an homogeneous way. In this paper, we discuss extensions of SPARQL that use regular expressions to navigate RDF graphs and may be used to answer queries considering RDFS semantics. We also consider their embedding as extensions of SPARQL. These SPARQL extensions are interpreted within the proposed framework and their drawbacks are presented. In particular, we show that the PSPARQL query language, a strict extension of SPARQL offering transitive closure, allows for answering SPARQL queries modulo RDFS graphs with the same complexity as SPARQL through a simple transformation of the queries. We also consider languages which, in addition to paths, provide constraints. In particular, we present and compare nSPARQL and our proposal CPSPARQL. We show that CPSPARQL is expressive enough to answer full SPARQL queries modulo RDFS. Finally, we compare the expressiveness and complexity of both nSPARQL and the corresponding fragment of CPSPARQL, that we call cpSPARQL. We show that both languages have the same complexity through cpSPARQL, being a proper extension of SPARQL graph patterns, is more expressive than nSPARQL.Comment: RR-8394; alkhateeb2003

Equality-friendly well-founded semantics and applications to description logics

We tackle the problem of defining a well-founded semantics (WFS) for Datalog rules with existentially quantified variables in their heads and nega- tions in their bodies. In particular, we provide a WFS for the recent Datalog± family of ontology languages, which covers several important description logics (DLs). To do so, we generalize Datalog± by non-stratified nonmonotonic nega- tion in rule bodies, and we define a WFS for this generalization via guarded fixed point logic. We refer to this approach as equality-friendly WFS, since it has the advantage that it does not make the unique name assumption (UNA); this brings it close to OWL and its profiles as well as typical DLs, which also do not make the UNA. We prove that for guarded Datalog± with negation under the equality- friendly WFS, conjunctive query answering is decidable, and we provide precise complexity results for this problem. From these results, we obtain precise defi- nitions of the standard WFS extensions of EL and of members of the DL-Lite family, as well as corresponding complexity results for query answering

DL-lite with attributes and datatypes

We extend the DL-Lite languages by means of attributes and datatypes. Attributes -- a notion borrowed from data models -- associate concrete values from datatypes to abstract objects and in this way complement roles, which describe relationships between abstract objects. The extended languages remain tractable (with a notable exception) even though they contain both existential and (a limited form of) universal quantification. We present complexity results for two most important reasoning problems in DL-Lite: combined complexity of knowledge base satisfiability and data complexity of positive existential query answering