Publication and Discovery of Semantically Annotated Geospatial Web Services

Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, August 29 - 31, 2012 Umweltbundesamt DessauEnvironmental information and services have become a crucial asset in the creation of decission support systems. Unfortunately, this information and services are not usually exposed in an interoperable and standard way, limiting their reusability and impact in the community. Publishing and discovering geospatial information and services on the Web is therefore an important challenge in order to create a breeding ground for collaboration and more sophisticated environmental platforms. Based on common standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as the starting point to ensure interoperability, we propose a discovery mechanism based on semantic annotations. OGC service descriptions are annotated with SAWSDL and linked to concepts in domain ontologies, following a common semantic service model. We seamlessly integrate the semantics in the standard OGC discovery infrastructure, extending the CSW service catalogues with semantic publication and discovery. Semantics queries can be created based on formal languages like WSML, significantly improving the precission of discovery. In this paper we present our approach, which provides a semantic infrastructure for publication and discovery of environmentally enabled web services

Logic Programming as Constructivism

The features of logic programming that seem unconventional from the viewpoint of classical logic can be explained in terms of constructivistic logic. We motivate and propose a constructivistic proof theory of non-Horn logic programming. Then, we apply this formalization for establishing results of practical interest. First, we show that 'stratification can be motivated in a simple and intuitive way. Relying on similar motivations, we introduce the larger classes of 'loosely stratified' and 'constructively consistent' programs. Second, we give a formal basis for introducing quantifiers into queries and logic programs by defining 'constructively domain independent* formulas. Third, we extend the Generalized Magic Sets procedure to loosely stratified and constructively consistent programs, by relying on a 'conditional fixpoini procedure

A data complexity and rewritability tetrachotomy of ontology-mediated queries with a covering axiom

Aiming to understand the data complexity of answering conjunctive queries mediated by an axiom stating that a class is covered by the union of two other classes, we show that deciding their first-order rewritability is PSPACE-hard and obtain a number of sufficient conditions for membership in AC0, L, NL, and P. Our main result is a complete syntactic AC0/NL/P/CONP tetrachotomy of path queries under the assumption that the covering classes are disjoint

A tetrachotomy of ontology-mediated queries with a covering axiom

Our concern is the problem of efficiently determining the data complexity of answering queries mediated by descrip- tion logic ontologies and constructing their optimal rewritings to standard database queries. Originated in ontology- based data access and datalog optimisation, this problem is known to be computationally very complex in general, with no explicit syntactic characterisations available. In this article, aiming to understand the fundamental roots of this difficulty, we strip the problem to the bare bones and focus on Boolean conjunctive queries mediated by a simple cov- ering axiom stating that one class is covered by the union of two other classes. We show that, on the one hand, these rudimentary ontology-mediated queries, called disjunctive sirups (or d-sirups), capture many features and difficulties of the general case. For example, answering d-sirups is Π2p-complete for combined complexity and can be in AC0 or L-, NL-, P-, or coNP-complete for data complexity (with the problem of recognising FO-rewritability of d-sirups be- ing 2ExpTime-hard); some d-sirups only have exponential-size resolution proofs, some only double-exponential-size positive existential FO-rewritings and single-exponential-size nonrecursive datalog rewritings. On the other hand, we prove a few partial sufficient and necessary conditions of FO- and (symmetric/linear-) datalog rewritability of d- sirups. Our main technical result is a complete and transparent syntactic AC0 / NL / P / coNP tetrachotomy of d-sirups with disjoint covering classes and a path-shaped Boolean conjunctive query. To obtain this tetrachotomy, we develop new techniques for establishing P- and coNP-hardness of answering non-Horn ontology-mediated queries as well as showing that they can be answered in NL

A tetrachotomy of ontology-mediated queries with a covering axiom

Our concern is the problem of efficiently determining the data complexity of answering queries mediated by descrip- tion logic ontologies and constructing their optimal rewritings to standard database queries. Originated in ontology- based data access and datalog optimisation, this problem is known to be computationally very complex in general, with no explicit syntactic characterisations available. In this article, aiming to understand the fundamental roots of this difficulty, we strip the problem to the bare bones and focus on Boolean conjunctive queries mediated by a simple cov- ering axiom stating that one class is covered by the union of two other classes. We show that, on the one hand, these rudimentary ontology-mediated queries, called disjunctive sirups (or d-sirups), capture many features and difficulties of the general case. For example, answering d-sirups is Π2p-complete for combined complexity and can be in AC0 or L-, NL-, P-, or coNP-complete for data complexity (with the problem of recognising FO-rewritability of d-sirups be- ing 2ExpTime-hard); some d-sirups only have exponential-size resolution proofs, some only double-exponential-size positive existential FO-rewritings and single-exponential-size nonrecursive datalog rewritings. On the other hand, we prove a few partial sufficient and necessary conditions of FO- and (symmetric/linear-) datalog rewritability of d- sirups. Our main technical result is a complete and transparent syntactic AC0 / NL / P / coNP tetrachotomy of d-sirups with disjoint covering classes and a path-shaped Boolean conjunctive query. To obtain this tetrachotomy, we develop new techniques for establishing P- and coNP-hardness of answering non-Horn ontology-mediated queries as well as showing that they can be answered in NL

Sur l'analyse statique des requêtes SPARQL avec la logique modale

Static analysis is a core task in query optimization and knowledge base verification. We study static analysis techniques for SPARQL, the standard language for querying Semantic Web data. Specifically, we investigate the query containment problem and the query-update independence analysis. We are interested in developing techniques through reductions to the validity problem in logic.We address SPARQL query containment with optional matching. We focus on the class of well-designed SPARQL queries, proposed in the literature as a fragment of the language with good properties regarding query evaluation. SPARQL is interpreted over graphs, hence we encode it in a graph logic, specifically the modal logic K interpreted over label transition systems. We show that this logic is powerful enough to deal with query containment for the well-designed fragment of SPARQL. We show how to translate RDF graphs into transition systems and SPARQL queries into K-formulae. Therefore, query containment in SPARQL can be reduced to unsatisfiability in K.We also report on a preliminary overview of the SPARQL query-update problem. A query is independent of an update when the execution of the update does not affect the result of the query. Determining independence is especially useful in the contest of huge RDF repositories, where it permits to avoid expensive yet useless re-evaluation of queries. While this problem has been intensively studied for fragments of relational calculus, no works exist for the standard query language for the semantic web. We report on our investigations on how a notion of independence can be defined in the SPARQL contextL’analyse statique est une tâche essentielle dans l’optimisation des requêtes et la vérification de la base de graphes RDF. Nous étudions des techniques d’analyse statique pour SPARQL, le langage standard pour l’interrogation des données du Web sémantique. Plus précisément, nous étudions le problème d’inclusion des requêtes et de l’analyse de l’indépendance entre les requêtes et la mise à jour de la base de graphes RDF.Nous sommes intéressés par le développement de techniques grâce à des réductions au problème de la satisfaisabilité de la logique.Nous nous traitons le problème d’inclusion des requêtes SPARQL en présence de l’opérateur OPTIONAL. L’optionalité est l’un des constructeurs les plus compliqués dans SPARQL et aussi celui qui rend ce langage plus expressif que les langages de requêtes classiques, comme SQL.Nous nous concentrons sur la classe de requêtes appelée "well-designed SPARQL", proposées dans la littérature comme un fragment du langage avec de bonnes propriétés en matière d’évaluation des requêtes incluent l’opération OPTIONAL. À ce jour, l’inclusion de requête a été testée à l’aide de différentes techniques: homomorphisme de graphes, bases de données canoniques, techniques de la théorie des automates et réduction au problème de la validité d’une logique. Dans cette thèse, nous utilisons la dernière technique pour tester l’inclusion des requêtes SPARQL avec OPTIONAL utilisant une logique expressive appelée «logique K». En utilisant cette technique, il est possible de régler le problème d’inclusion des requêtes pour plusieurs fragment de SPARQL, même en présence de schémas. Cette extensibilité n’est pas garantie par les autres méthodes.Nous montrons comment traduire a graphe RDF en un système de transitions, ainsi que une requête SPARQL en une formula K. Avec ces traductions, l’inclusion des requêtes dans SPARQL peut être réduite au test de la validité d’une formule logique. Un avantage de cette approche est d’ouvrir la voie pour des implémentations utilisant solveurs de satisfiabilité pour K.Nous présentons un banc d’essais de tests d’inclusion pour les requêtes SPARQL avec OPTIONAL. Nous avons effectué des expériences pour tester et comparer des solveurs d’inclusion de l’état de l’art.Nous présentons également un aperçu préliminaire du problème d’indépendance entre requête et mise à jour. Une requête est indépendante de la mise à jour lorsque l’exécution de la mise à jour ne modifie pas le résultat de la requête. Bien que ce problème ait été intensivement étudié pour des fragments de calcul relationnel, il n’existe pas de travaux pour le langage de requêtes standard pour le web sémantique. Nous proposons une définition de la notion de l’indépendance dans le contexte de SPARQL et nous établissons des premières pistes de analyse statique dans certains situations d’inclusion entre une requête et une mise à jour