Planning Problems for Graph Structured Data in Description Logics ∗

Motivation The complex structure and increasing size of information that has to be managed in today’s applications calls for flexible mechanisms for storing such information, making it easily and efficiently accessible, and facilitating its change and evolution over time. The paradigm of graph structured data (GSD) [5] has gained popularity recently as an alternative to traditional relational databases that provides more flexibility and thus can overcome the limitations of an a priori imposed rigid structure on the data. Indeed, differently from relational data, GSD do not require a schema to be fixed a priori. This flexibility makes them well suited for many emerging application areas such as managing Web data, information integration, persistent storage in object-oriented software development, or management of scientific data. Concrete examples of models for GSD are RDFS [2], object-oriented data models, and XML. Here we build on recent work that advocates the use of Description Logics (DLs) for managing change in GSD that happens as the result of (agents or users) executing actions [4]. We consider GSD understood in a broad sense, as information represented by means of a node and edge labeled graph, in which the labels convey semantic information