Reimagining invasions; the social and cultural impacts of Prosopis on pastoralists in Southern Afar

Abstract Whilst the environmental impacts of biological invasions are clearly conceptualised and there is growing evidence on the economic benefits and costs, the social and cultural dimensions remain poorly understood. This paper presents the perceptions of pastoralist communities in southern Afar, Ethiopian lowlands, on one invasive species, Prosopis juliflora. The socio-cultural impacts are assessed, and the manner in which they interact with other drivers of vulnerability, including political marginalisation, sedentarisation and conflict, is explored. The research studied 10 communities and undertook semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. These results were supported by interviews with community leaders and key informants. The benefits and costs were analysed using the asset-based framework of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and the subject-focused approach of Wellbeing in Development. The results demonstrate that the costs of invasive species are felt across all of the livelihood capital bases (financial, natural, physical, human and social) highlighted within the framework and that the impacts cross multiple assets, such as reducing access through blocking roads. The concept of Wellbeing in Development provides a lens to examine neglected impacts, like conflict, community standing, political marginalisation and cultural impoverishment, and a freedom of definition and vocabulary to allow the participants to define their own epistemologies. The research highlights that impacts spread across assets, transcend objective and subjective classification, but also that impacts interact with other drivers of vulnerability. Pastoralists report deepened and broadened conflict, complicated relationships with the state and increased sedentarisation within invaded areas. The paper demonstrates that biological invasions have complex social and cultural implications beyond the environmental and economic costs which are commonly presented. Through synthesising methodologies and tools which capture local knowledge and perceptions, these implications and relationships are conceptualised

TeCoRe: temporal conflict resolution in knowledge graphs

The management of uncertainty is crucial when harvesting structured content from unstructured and noisy sources. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), maintaining both numerical and non-numerical facts supported by an underlying schema, are a prominent example. Knowledge Graph management is challenging because: (i) most of existing KGs focus on static data, thus impeding the availability of timewise knowledge; (ii) facts in KGs are usually accompanied by a confidence score, which witnesses how likely it is for them to hold. We demonstrate TECORE, a system for temporal inference and conflict resolution in uncertain temporal knowledge graphs (UTKGs). At the heart of TECORE are two state-of-the-art probabilistic reasoners that are able to deal with temporal constraints efficiently. While one is scalable, the other can cope with more expressive constraints. The demonstration will focus on enabling users and applications to find inconsistencies in UTKGs. TECORE provides an interface allowing to select UTKGs and editing constraints; shows the maximal consistent subset of the UTKG, and displays statistics (e.g., number of noisy facts removed) about the debugging process

SPARQL Query Containment with ShEx Constraints

International audienceShEx (Shape Expressions) is a language for expressing constraints on RDF graphs. We consider the problem of SPARQL query containment in the presence of ShEx constraints. We first investigate the complexity of the problem according to the fragments considered for SPARQL queries and for ShEx constraints. In particular, we show that the complexity of SPARQL query containment remains the same with or without ShEx constraints. We develop two radically different approaches for solving the problem and we evaluate them. The first approach relies on the joint use of a ShEx validator and a tool for checking query containment without constraints. In a second approach, we show how the problem can be solved by a reduction to a fragment of first-order logic with two variables. This alternative approach allows to take advantage of any of the many existing FOL theorem provers in this context. We evaluate how the two approaches compare experimentally, and report on lessons learned. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing SPARQL query containment in the presence of ShEx constraints

GRaCe: a Relaxed Approach for Graph Query Caching

none3nononeFrancesco De Fino, Barbara Catania, Giovanna GuerriniDE FINO, Francesco; Catania, Barbara; Guerrini, Giovann