44,052 research outputs found
On the Data Complexity of Consistent Query Answering over Graph Databases
Areas in which graph databases are applied - such as the semantic web, social networks and scientific databases - are prone to inconsistency, mainly due to interoperability issues. This raises the need for understanding query answering over inconsistent graph databases in a framework that is simple yet general enough to accommodate many of its applications. We follow the well-known approach of consistent query answering (CQA), and study the data complexity of CQA over graph databases for regular path queries (RPQs) and regular path constraints (RPCs), which are frequently used. We concentrate on subset, superset and symmetric difference repairs. Without further restrictions, CQA is undecidable for the semantics based on superset and symmetric difference repairs, and Pi_2^P-complete for subset repairs. However, we provide several tractable restrictions on both RPCs and the structure of graph databases that lead to decidability, and even tractability of CQA. We also compare our results with those obtained for CQA in the context of relational databases
Inconsistency-tolerant Query Answering in Ontology-based Data Access
Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is receiving great attention as a new paradigm for managing information systems through semantic technologies. According to this paradigm, a Description Logic ontology provides an abstract and formal representation of the domain of interest to the information system, and is used as a sophisticated schema for accessing the data and formulating queries over them. In this paper, we address the problem of dealing with inconsistencies in OBDA. Our general goal is both to study DL semantical frameworks that are inconsistency-tolerant, and to devise techniques for answering unions of conjunctive queries under such inconsistency-tolerant semantics. Our work is inspired by the approaches to consistent query answering in databases, which are based on the idea of living with inconsistencies in the database, but trying to obtain only consistent information during query answering, by relying on the notion of database repair. We first adapt the notion of database repair to our context, and show that, according to such a notion, inconsistency-tolerant query answering is intractable, even for very simple DLs. Therefore, we propose a different repair-based semantics, with the goal of reaching a good compromise between the expressive power of the semantics and the computational complexity of inconsistency-tolerant query answering. Indeed, we show that query answering under the new semantics is first-order rewritable in OBDA, even if the ontology is expressed in one of the most expressive members of the DL-Lite family
Consistent Query Answers in the Presence of Universal Constraints
The framework of consistent query answers and repairs has been introduced to
alleviate the impact of inconsistent data on the answers to a query. A repair
is a minimally different consistent instance and an answer is consistent if it
is present in every repair. In this article we study the complexity of
consistent query answers and repair checking in the presence of universal
constraints.
We propose an extended version of the conflict hypergraph which allows to
capture all repairs w.r.t. a set of universal constraints. We show that repair
checking is in PTIME for the class of full tuple-generating dependencies and
denial constraints, and we present a polynomial repair algorithm. This
algorithm is sound, i.e. always produces a repair, but also complete, i.e.
every repair can be constructed. Next, we present a polynomial-time algorithm
computing consistent answers to ground quantifier-free queries in the presence
of denial constraints, join dependencies, and acyclic full-tuple generating
dependencies. Finally, we show that extending the class of constraints leads to
intractability. For arbitrary full tuple-generating dependencies consistent
query answering becomes coNP-complete. For arbitrary universal constraints
consistent query answering is \Pi_2^p-complete and repair checking
coNP-complete.Comment: Submitted to Information System
Consistent Query Answering for Primary Keys on Rooted Tree Queries
We study the data complexity of consistent query answering (CQA) on databases
that may violate the primary key constraints. A repair is a maximal subset of
the database satisfying the primary key constraints. For a Boolean query q, the
problem CERTAINTY(q) takes a database as input, and asks whether or not each
repair satisfies q. The computational complexity of CERTAINTY(q) has been
established whenever q is a self-join-free Boolean conjunctive query, or a (not
necessarily self-join-free) Boolean path query. In this paper, we take one more
step towards a general classification for all Boolean conjunctive queries by
considering the class of rooted tree queries. In particular, we show that for
every rooted tree query q, CERTAINTY(q) is in FO, NL-hard LFP, or
coNP-complete, and it is decidable (in polynomial time), given q, which of the
three cases applies. We also extend our classification to larger classes of
queries with simple primary keys. Our classification criteria rely on query
homomorphisms and our polynomial-time fixpoint algorithm is based on a novel
use of context-free grammar (CFG).Comment: To appear in PODS'2
A SAT-based System for Consistent Query Answering
An inconsistent database is a database that violates one or more integrity
constraints, such as functional dependencies. Consistent Query Answering is a
rigorous and principled approach to the semantics of queries posed against
inconsistent databases. The consistent answers to a query on an inconsistent
database is the intersection of the answers to the query on every repair, i.e.,
on every consistent database that differs from the given inconsistent one in a
minimal way. Computing the consistent answers of a fixed conjunctive query on a
given inconsistent database can be a coNP-hard problem, even though every fixed
conjunctive query is efficiently computable on a given consistent database.
We designed, implemented, and evaluated CAvSAT, a SAT-based system for
consistent query answering. CAvSAT leverages a set of natural reductions from
the complement of consistent query answering to SAT and to Weighted MaxSAT. The
system is capable of handling unions of conjunctive queries and arbitrary
denial constraints, which include functional dependencies as a special case. We
report results from experiments evaluating CAvSAT on both synthetic and
real-world databases. These results provide evidence that a SAT-based approach
can give rise to a comprehensive and scalable system for consistent query
answering.Comment: 25 pages including appendix, to appear in the 22nd International
Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testin
A Robust Logical and Computational Characterisation of Peer-to-Peer Database Systems
In this paper we give a robust logical and computational characterisation of peer-to-peer (p2p) database systems. We first define a precise model-theoretic semantics of a p2p system, which allows for local inconsistency handling. We then characterise the general computational properties for the problem of answering queries to such a p2p system. Finally, we devise tight complexity bounds and distributed procedures for the problem of answering queries in few relevant special cases
Ontology-based data access with databases: a short course
Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is regarded as a key ingredient of the new generation of information systems. In the OBDA paradigm, an ontology defines a high-level global schema of (already existing) data sources and provides a vocabulary for user queries. An OBDA system rewrites such queries and ontologies into the vocabulary of the data sources and then delegates the actual query evaluation to a suitable query answering system such as a relational database management system or a datalog engine. In this chapter, we mainly focus on OBDA with the ontology language OWL 2QL, one of the three profiles of the W3C standard Web Ontology Language OWL 2, and relational databases, although other possible languages will also be discussed. We consider different types of conjunctive query rewriting and their succinctness, different architectures of OBDA systems, and give an overview of the OBDA system Ontop
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