Ontology-Mediated Query Answering for Probabilistic Temporal Data with EL Ontologies: Extended Version

Especially in the field of stream reasoning, there is an increased interest in reasoning about temporal data in order to detect situations of interest or complex events. Ontologies have been proved a useful way to infer missing information from incomplete data, or simply to allow for a higher order vocabulary to be used in the event descriptions. Motivated by this, ontology-based temporal query answering has been proposed as a means for the recognition of situations and complex events. But often, the data to be processed do not only contain temporal information, but also probabilistic information, for example because of uncertain sensor measurements. While there has been a plethora of research on ontologybased temporal query answering, only little is known so far about querying temporal probabilistic data using ontologies. This work addresses this problem by introducing a temporal query language that extends a well-investigated temporal query language with probability operators, and investigating the complexity of answering queries using this query language together with ontologies formulated in the description logic EL

Query Answering in Probabilistic Data and Knowledge Bases

Probabilistic data and knowledge bases are becoming increasingly important in academia and industry. They are continuously extended with new data, powered by modern information extraction tools that associate probabilities with knowledge base facts. The state of the art to store and process such data is founded on probabilistic database systems, which are widely and successfully employed. Beyond all the success stories, however, such systems still lack the fundamental machinery to convey some of the valuable knowledge hidden in them to the end user, which limits their potential applications in practice. In particular, in their classical form, such systems are typically based on strong, unrealistic limitations, such as the closed-world assumption, the closed-domain assumption, the tuple-independence assumption, and the lack of commonsense knowledge. These limitations do not only lead to unwanted consequences, but also put such systems on weak footing in important tasks, querying answering being a very central one. In this thesis, we enhance probabilistic data and knowledge bases with more realistic data models, thereby allowing for better means for querying them. Building on the long endeavor of unifying logic and probability, we develop different rigorous semantics for probabilistic data and knowledge bases, analyze their computational properties and identify sources of (in)tractability and design practical scalable query answering algorithms whenever possible. To achieve this, the current work brings together some recent paradigms from logics, probabilistic inference, and database theory

Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs

Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas

Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade

First-Order Rewritability and Complexity of Two-Dimensional Temporal Ontology-Mediated Queries

Aiming at ontology-based data access to temporal data, we design two-dimensional temporal ontology and query languages by combining logics from the (extended) DL-Lite family with linear temporal logic LTL over discrete time (Z,<). Our main concern is first-order rewritability of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) that consist of a 2D ontology and a positive temporal instance query. Our target languages for FO-rewritings are two-sorted FO(<) - first-order logic with sorts for time instants ordered by the built-in precedence relation < and for the domain of individuals - its extension FOE with the standard congruence predicates t \equiv 0 mod n, for any fixed n > 1, and FO(RPR) that admits relational primitive recursion. In terms of circuit complexity, FOE- and FO(RPR)-rewritability guarantee answering OMQs in uniform AC0 and NC1, respectively. We proceed in three steps. First, we define a hierarchy of 2D DL-Lite/LTL ontology languages and investigate the FO-rewritability of OMQs with atomic queries by constructing projections onto 1D LTL OMQs and employing recent results on the FO-rewritability of propositional LTL OMQs. As the projections involve deciding consistency of ontologies and data, we also consider the consistency problem for our languages. While the undecidability of consistency for 2D ontology languages with expressive Boolean role inclusions might be expected, we also show that, rather surprisingly, the restriction to Krom and Horn role inclusions leads to decidability (and ExpSpace-completeness), even if one admits full Booleans on concepts. As a final step, we lift some of the rewritability results for atomic OMQs to OMQs with expressive positive temporal instance queries. The lifting results are based on an in-depth study of the canonical models and only concern Horn ontologies

Ontology-Based Query Answering for Probabilistic Temporal Data: Extended Version

We investigate ontology-based query answering for data that are both temporal and probabilistic, which might occur in contexts such as stream reasoning or situation recognition with uncertain data. We present a framework that allows to represent temporal probabilistic data, and introduce a query language with which complex temporal and probabilistic patterns can be described. Specifically, this language combines conjunctive queries with operators from linear time logic as well as probability operators. We analyse the complexities of evaluating queries in this language in various settings. While in some cases, combining the temporal and the probabilistic dimension in such a way comes at the cost of increased complexity, we also determine cases for which this increase can be avoided.This is an extended version of the article to appear in the proceedings of AAAI 2019

Maybe Eventually? Towards Combining Temporal and Probabilistic Description Logics and Queries: Extended Version

We present some initial results on ontology-based query answering with description logic ontologies that may employ temporal and probabilistic operators on concepts and axioms. Speci_cally, we consider description logics extended with operators from linear temporal logic (LTL), as well as subjective probability operators, and an extended query language in which conjunctive queries can be combined using these operators. We first show some complexity results for the setting in which either only temporal operators or only probabilistic operators may be used, both in the ontology and in the query, and then show a 2ExpSpace lower bound for the setting in which both types of operators can be used together.This is an extended version of an article accepted at Description Logics 2019

From fuzzy to annotated semantic web languages

The aim of this chapter is to present a detailed, selfcontained and comprehensive account of the state of the art in representing and reasoning with fuzzy knowledge in Semantic Web Languages such as triple languages RDF/RDFS, conceptual languages of the OWL 2 family and rule languages. We further show how one may generalise them to so-called annotation domains, that cover also e.g. temporal and provenance extensions

OWL Reasoners still useable in 2023

In a systematic literature and software review over 100 OWL reasoners/systems were analyzed to see if they would still be usable in 2023. This has never been done in this capacity. OWL reasoners still play an important role in knowledge organisation and management, but the last comprehensive surveys/studies are more than 8 years old. The result of this work is a comprehensive list of 95 standalone OWL reasoners and systems using an OWL reasoner. For each item, information on project pages, source code repositories and related documentation was gathered. The raw research data is provided in a Github repository for anyone to use