We study temporal description logics (TDLs) based on the branching-time temporal logic CTL and the lightweight DL EL in the presence of rigid roles and restricted TBoxes. While TDLs designed in this way are known to be inherently nonelementary or even undecidable over general TBoxes, there is hope for a better computational behaviour over acyclic or empty TBoxes. We begin by showing that the basic DL ALC combined with CTL in the described way is indeed decidable, but still inherently nonelementary. As our main contribution, we identify several TDLs of elementary complexity, obtained by combining EL with CTL fragments that allow only restricted sets of temporal operators. We obtain upper complexity bounds ranging from PTime to coNExpTime and mostly tight lower bounds. This contrasts the fact that the respective ALC variants are already inherently nonelementary.

Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) have been put forward as a semantically rich representation of a domain, using a DL KB to account for its static aspects, and actions to evolve its extensional part over time, possibly introducing new objects. Recently, KABs have been extended to manage inconsistency, with ad-hoc verification techniques geared towards specific semantics. This work provides a twofold contribution along this line of research. On the one hand, we enrich KABs with a high-level, compact action language inspired by Golog, obtaining so called Golog-KABs (GKABs). On the other hand, we introduce a parametric execution semantics for GKABs, so as to elegantly accomodate a plethora of inconsistency-aware semantics based on the notion of repair. We then provide several reductions for the verification of sophisticated first-order temporal properties over inconsistency-aware GKABs, and show that it can be addressed using known techniques, developed for standard KABs.

In this paper we investigate situation calculus action theories extended with ontologies, expressed as description logics TBoxes that act as state constraints. We show that this combination, while natural and desirable, is particularly problematic: it leads to undecidability of the simplest form of reasoning, namely satisfiability, even for the simplest kinds of description logics and the simplest kind of situation calculus action theories.

We consider existential rules (aka Datalog +/-) as a formalism for specifying ontologies. In recent years, many classes of existential rules have been exhibited for which conjunctive query (CQ) entailment is decidable. However, most of these classes cannot express transitivity of binary relations, a frequently used modelling construct. In this paper, we address the issue of whether transitivity can be safely combined with decidable classes of existential rules. First, we prove that transitivity is incompatible with one of the simplest decidable classes, namely aGRD (acyclic graph of rule dependencies), which clarifies the landscape of ‘finite expansion sets’ of rules. Second, we show that transitivity can be safely added to linear rules (a subclass of guarded rules, which generalizes the description logic DL-LiteR) in the case of atomic CQs, and also for general CQs if we place a minor syntactic restriction on the rule set. This is shown by means of a novel query rewriting algorithm that is specially tailored to handle transitivity rules. Third, for the identified decidable cases, we pinpoint the combined and data complexities of query entailment.

Query answering under existential rules — implications with existential quantifiers in the head — is known to be decidable when imposing restrictions on the rule bodies such as frontier-guardedness [Baget et al., 2010; Baget et al., 2011a]. Query answering is also decidable for description logics [Baader, 2003], which further allow disjunction and functionality constraints (assert that certain relations are functions); however, they are focused on ER-type schemas, where relations have arity two. This work investigates how to get the best of both worlds: having decidable existential rules on arbitrary arity relations, while allowing rich description logics, including functionality constraints, on arity-two relations. We first show negative results on combining such decidable languages. Second, we introduce an expressive set of existential rules (frontier-one rules with a certain restriction) which can be combined with powerful constraints on arity-two relations (e.g. GC2, ALCQIb) while retaining decidable query answering. Further, we provide conditions to add functionality constraints on the higher-arity relations.

Artifact-centric models for business processes recently raised a lot of attention, as they manage to combine structural (i.e. data related) with dynamical (i.e. process related) aspects in a seamless way. Many frameworks developed under this approach, although, are not built explicitly for planning, one of the most prominent operations related to business processes. In this paper, we try to overcome this by proposing a framework named Dynamic Knowledge Bases, aimed at describing rich business domains through Description Logic-based ontologies, and where a set of actions allows the system to evolve by modifying such ontologies. This framework, by offering action rewriting and knowledge partialization, represents a viable and formal environment to develop decision making and planning techniques for DL-based artifact-centric business domains.

Formal ontology provides axiomatizations of domain independent principles which, among other applications, can be used to identify modeling errors within a knowledge base. The Ontoclean methodology is probably the best-known illustration of this strategy, but its cost in terms of manual work is often considered dissuasive. This article investigates the applicability of such debugging strategies to Description Logics knowledge bases, showing that even a partial and shallow analysis rapidly performed with a top-level ontology can reveal the presence of violations of common sense, and that the bottleneck, if there is one, may instead reside in the resolution of the resulting inconsistency or incoherence.

We design a tractable Horn fragment of the Halpern-Shoham temporal logic and extend it to interval-based temporal description logics, instance checking in which is P-complete for both combined and data complexity.

Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) have been recently proposed as a formal framework to capture the dynamics of systems which manipulate Description Logic (DL) Knowledge Bases (KBs) through action execution. In this work, we enrich the KAB setting with contextual information, making use of different context dimensions. On the one hand, context is determined by the environment using context-changing actions that make use of the current state of the KB and the current context. On the other hand, it affects the set of TBox assertions that are relevant at each time point, and that have to be considered when processing queries posed over the KAB. Here we extend to our enriched setting the results on verification of rich temporal properties expressed in mu-calculus, which had been established for standard KABs. Specifically, we show that under a run-boundedness condition, verification stays decidable.

OWL 2 EL is a popular ontology language that supports role inclusions---that is, axioms that capture compositional properties of roles. Role inclusions closely correspond to context-free grammars, which was used to show that answering conjunctive queries (CQs) over OWL 2 EL knowledge bases with unrestricted role inclusions is undecidable. However, OWL 2 EL inherits from OWL 2 DL the syntactic regularity restriction on role inclusions, which ensures that role chains implying a particular role can be described using a finite automaton (FA). This is sufficient to ensure decidability of CQ answering; however, the FAs can be worst-case exponential in size so the known approaches do not provide a tight upper complexity bound. In this paper, we solve this open problem and show that answering CQs over OWL 2 EL knowledge bases is PSPACE-complete in combined complexity (i.e., the complexity measured in the total size of the input). To this end, we use a novel encoding of regular role inclusions using bounded-stack pushdown automata---that is, FAs extended with a stack of bounded size. Apart from theoretical interest, our encoding can be used in practical tableau algorithms to avoid the exponential blowup due to role inclusions. In addition, we sharpen the lower complexity bound and show that the problem is PSPACE-hard even if we consider only role inclusions as part of the input (i.e., the query and all other parts of the knowledge base are fixed). Finally, we turn our attention to navigational queries over OWL 2 EL knowledge bases, and we show that answering positive, converse-free conjunctive graph XPath queries is PSPACE-complete as well; this is interesting since allowing the converse operator in queries is known to make the problem EXPTIME-hard. Thus, in this paper we present several important contributions to the landscape of the complexity of answering expressive queries over description logic knowledge bases.