Temporalised Description Logics for Monitoring Partially Observable Events

Inevitably, it becomes more and more important to verify that the systems surrounding us have certain properties. This is indeed unavoidable for safety-critical systems such as power plants and intensive-care units. We refer to the term system in a broad sense: it may be man-made (e.g. a computer system) or natural (e.g. a patient in an intensive-care unit). Whereas in Model Checking it is assumed that one has complete knowledge about the functioning of the system, we consider an open-world scenario and assume that we can only observe the behaviour of the actual running system by sensors. Such an abstract sensor could sense e.g. the blood pressure of a patient or the air traffic observed by radar. Then the observed data are preprocessed appropriately and stored in a fact base. Based on the data available in the fact base, situation-awareness tools are supposed to help the user to detect certain situations that require intervention by an expert. Such situations could be that the heart-rate of a patient is rather high while the blood pressure is low, or that a collision of two aeroplanes is about to happen. Moreover, the information in the fact base can be used by monitors to verify that the system has certain properties. It is not realistic, however, to assume that the sensors always yield a complete description of the current state of the observed system. Thus, it makes sense to assume that information that is not present in the fact base is unknown rather than false. Moreover, very often one has some knowledge about the functioning of the system. This background knowledge can be used to draw conclusions about the possible future behaviour of the system. Employing description logics (DLs) is one way to deal with these requirements. In this thesis, we tackle the sketched problem in three different contexts: (i) runtime verification using a temporalised DL, (ii) temporalised query entailment, and (iii) verification in DL-based action formalisms

Description Logics of Context with Rigid Roles Revisited

To represent and reason about contextualized knowledge often two-dimensional Description Logics (DLs) are employed, where one DL is used to describe contexts (or possible worlds) and the other DL is used to describe the objects, i.e. the relational structure of the specific contexts. Previous approaches for DLs of context that combined pairs of DLs resulted in undecidability in those cases where so-called rigid roles are admitted, i.e. if parts of the relational structure are the same in all contexts. In this paper, we present a novel combination of pairs of DLs and show that reasoning stays decidable even in the presence of rigid roles. We give complexity results for various combinations of DLs involving ALC, SHOQ, and EL

Runtime Verification Using a Temporal Description Logic Revisited

Formulae of linear temporal logic (LTL) can be used to specify (wanted or unwanted) properties of a dynamical system. In model checking, the system’s behaviour is described by a transition system, and one needs to check whether all possible traces of this transition system satisfy the formula. In runtime verification, one observes the actual system behaviour, which at any point in time yields a finite prefix of a trace. The task is then to check whether all continuations of this prefix to a trace satisfy (violate) the formula. More precisely, one wants to construct a monitor, i.e., a finite automaton that receives the finite prefix as input and then gives the right answer based on the state currently reached. In this paper, we extend the known approaches to LTL runtime verification in two directions. First, instead of propositional LTL we use the more expressive temporal logic ALC-LTL, which can use axioms of the Description Logic (DL) ALC instead of propositional variables to describe properties of single states of the system. Second, instead of assuming that the observed system behaviour provides us with complete information about the states of the system, we assume that states are described in an incomplete way by ALC-knowledge bases. We show that also in this setting monitors can effectively be constructed. The (double-exponential) size of the constructed monitors is in fact optimal, and not higher than in the propositional case. As an auxiliary result, we show how to construct Büchi automata for ALC-LTL-formulae, which yields alternative proofs for the known upper bounds of deciding satisfiability in ALC-LTL

Temporal Conjunctive Queries in Expressive DLs with Non-simple Roles

In Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA), user queries are evaluated over a set of facts under the open world assumption, while taking into account background knowledge given in the form of a Description Logic (DL) ontology. Motivated by situation awareness applications, temporal conjunctive queries (TCQs) have recently been proposed as a useful extension of traditional OBDA to support the processing of temporal information. This paper extends the existing complexity analysis of TCQ entailment to very expressive DLs underlying the OWL 2 standard, and in contrast to previous work also allows for queries containing transitive roles.This is an extended version of the paper “Temporal Conjunctive Queries in Expressive Description Logics with Transitive Roles”, published in the Proceedings of the 28th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI’15)

Query Rewriting for DL-Lite with n-ary Concrete Domains: Extended Version

We investigate ontology-based query answering (OBQA) in a setting where both the ontology and the query can refer to concrete values such as numbers and strings. In contrast to previous work on this topic, the built-in predicates used to compare values are not restricted to being unary. We introduce restrictions on these predicates and on the ontology language that allow us to reduce OBQA to query answering in databases using the so-called combined rewriting approach. Though at first sight our restrictions are different from the ones used in previous work, we show that our results strictly subsume some of the existing first-order rewritability results for unary predicates.This is an extended version of a paper published in the proceedings of IJCAI 2017

Temporal Query Answering w.r.t. DL-Lite-Ontologies

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) generalizes query answering in relational databases. It allows to query a database by using the language of an ontology, abstracting from the actual relations of the database. For ontologies formulated in Description Logics of the DL-Lite family, OBDA can be realized by rewriting the query into a classical first-order query, e.g. an SQL query, by compiling the information of the ontology into the query. The query is then answered using classical database techniques. In this report, we consider a temporal version of OBDA. We propose a temporal query language that combines a linear temporal logic with queries over DL-Litecore-ontologies. This language is well-suited for expressing temporal properties of dynamical systems and is useful in context-aware applications that need to detect specific situations. Using a first-order rewriting approach, we transform our temporal queries into queries over a temporal database. We then present three approaches to answering the resulting queries, all having different advantages and drawbacks.This revised version proves that the presented algorithm achieves a bounded history encoding

Adding Causal Relationships to DL-based Action Formalisms

In the reasoning about actions community, causal relationships have been proposed as a possible approach for solving the ramification problem, i. e., the problem of how to deal with indirect effects of actions. In this paper, we show that causal relationships can be added to action formalisms based on Description Logics without destroying the decidability of the consistency and the projection problem

On the Complexity of Temporal Query Answering

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) generalizes query answering in databases towards deduction since (i) the fact base is not assumed to contain complete knowledge (i.e., there is no closed world assumption), and (ii) the interpretation of the predicates occurring in the queries is constrained by axioms of an ontology. OBDA has been investigated in detail for the case where the ontology is expressed by an appropriate Description Logic (DL) and the queries are conjunctive queries. Motivated by situation awareness applications, we investigate an extension of OBDA to the temporal case. As query language we consider an extension of the well-known propositional temporal logic LTL where conjunctive queries can occur in place of propositional variables, and as ontology language we use the prototypical expressive DL ALC. For the resulting instance of temporalized OBDA, we investigate both data complexity and combined complexity of the query entailment problem

Reasoning with Temporal Properties over Axioms of DL-Lite

Recently, a lot of research has combined description logics (DLs) of the DL-Lite family with temporal formalisms. Such logics are proposed to be used for situation recognition and temporalized ontology-based data access. In this report, we consider DL-Lite-LTL, in which axioms formulated in a member of the DL-Lite family are combined using the operators of propositional linear-time temporal logic (LTL). We consider the satisfiability problem of this logic in the presence of so-called rigid symbols whose interpretation does not change over time. In contrast to more expressive temporalized DLs, the computational complexity of this problem is the same as for LTL, even w.r.t. rigid symbols

Pressed into Party Support? : Media Influence on Partisan Attitudes during the 2005 UK General Election Campaign

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