The Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is a well-known calculus for representing part-whole and topological relations. It plays an important role in qualitative spatial reasoning, geographical information science, and ontology. The computational complexity of reasoning with RCC has been investigated in depth in the literature. Most of these works focus on the consistency of RCC constraint networks. In this paper, we consider the important problem of redundant RCC constraints.

We consider the scenario of ontology-based data access where a conjunctive query is evaluated against a database enriched with intensional knowledge via an ontology. It is generally accepted that true scalability of query answering in this setting can only be achieved by using standard relational database management systems (RDBMSs). An approach to query answering that enables the use of RDBMSs is the so-called polynomial combined approach. We investigate this approach for the main guarded- and sticky-based classes of existential rules, and we highlight the assumptions on the underlying schema which are sufficient for the polynomial combined first-order rewritability of those classes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which explicitly studies the polynomial combined approach for existential rules.

Inspired by recent work on higher-order Description Logics, we propose HOS, a new semantics for OWL 2 QL ontologies. We then consider SPARQL queries which are legal under the direct semantics entailment regime,we extend them with logical union, existential variables, and unrestricted use of variables so as to express meaningful meta-level queries. We show that both satisfiability checking and answering instance queries with metavariables have the same ABox complexity as under direct semantics.

Graphol is a visual language designed to help non-experts to understand and specify ontologies. Our language builds on the Entity-Relationship model, but has a formal semantics and higher expressiveness. Notably, OWL 2 can be completely encoded in Graphol. Thanks to the novel open-source Eddy ontology editor, designers can easily draw Graphol diagrams corresponding to OWL ontologies and export them into standard OWL 2 format. Both Graphol and Eddy have been used in several successful industrial projects and are currently under active development. This paper reports on our more recent progresses.

We consider the problem of obtaining coherence in a propositional knowledge base using techniques from Belief Change. Our motivation comes from the field of formal ontologies where coherence is interpreted to mean that a concept name has to be satisfiable. In the propositional case we consider here, this translates to a propositional formula being satisfiable. We define belief change operators in a framework of nonmonotonic preferential reasoning.We show how the introduction of defeasible information using contraction operators can be an effective means for obtaining coherence.

SPARQL, a query language for RDF graphs, is one of the key technologies for the Semantic Web. The expressivity and complexity of various fragments of SPARQL have been studied extensively. It is usually assumed that the optional matching operator OPTIONAL has only two graph patterns as arguments. The specification of SPARQL, however, defines it as a ternary operator, with an additional filter condition. We address the problem of expressibility of the full ternary OPTIONAL via the simplified binary version and show that it is possible, but only with an exponential blowup in the size of the query (under common complexity-theoretic assumptions). We also study expressibility of other non-monotone SPARQL operators via optional matching and each other.

Recently, the field of knowledge representation is drawing a lot of inspiration from database theory. In particular, in the area of description logics and ontology languages, interest has shifted from satisfiability checking to query answering, with various query notions adopted from databases, like (unions of) conjunctive queries or different kinds of path queries. Likewise, the finite model semantics is being established as a viable and interesting alternative to the traditional semantics based on unrestricted models. In this paper, we investigate diverse database-inspired reasoning problems for very expressive description logics (all featuring the worrisome trias of inverses, counting, and nominals) which have in common that role paths of unbounded length can be described (in the knowledge base or of the query), leading to a certain non-locality of the reasoning problem. We show that for all the cases considered, undecidability can be established by very similar means. Most notably, we show undecidability of finite entailment of unions of conjunctive queries for a fragment of SHOIQ (the logic underlying the OWL DL ontology language), and undecidability of finite entailment of conjunctive queries for a fragment of SROIQ (the logical basis of the more recent and popular OWL 2 DL standard).

Ontology alignment (also called ontology matching) is the process of identifying correspondences between entities in different, possibly heterogeneous, ontologies. Traditional ontology alignment techniques rely on the full disclosure of the ontological models; however, within open and opportunistic environments, such approaches may not always be pragmatic or even acceptable (due to privacy concerns). Several studies have focussed on collaborative, decentralised approaches to ontology alignment, where agents negotiate the acceptability of single correspondences acquired from past encounters, or try to ascertain novel correspondences on the fly. However, such approaches can lead to logical violations that may undermine their utility. In this paper, we extend a dialogical approach to correspondence negotiation, whereby agents not only exchange details of possible correspondences, but also identify potential violations to the consistency and conservativity principles. We present a formal model of the dialogue, and show how agents can repair logical violations during the dialogue by invoking a correspondence repair, thus negotiating and exchanging repair plans. We illustrate this opportunistic alignment mechanism with an example and we empirically show that allowing agents to strategically reject or weaken correspondences when these cause violations does not degrade the effectiveness of the alignment computed, whilst reducing the number of residual violations.

An ontology-based data access (OBDA) system is composed of one or more data sources, an ontology that provides a conceptual view of the data, and declarative mappings that relate the data and ontology schemas. In order to debug and optimize such systems, it is important to be able to analyze and compare OBDA specifications. Recent work in this direction compared specifications using classical notions of equivalence and entailment, but an interesting alternative is to consider query-based notions, in which two specifications are deemed equivalent if they give the same answers to the considered query or class of queries for all possible data sources. In this paper, we define such query-based notions of entailment and equivalence of OBDA specifications and investigate the complexity of the resulting analysis tasks when the ontology is formulated in (fragments of) DL-LiteR.

In the context of ontology-based data access with description logics (DLs), we study ontology-mediated queries in which selected predicates can be closed (OMQCs). In particular, we contribute to the classification of the data complexity of such queries in several relevant DLs. For the case where only concept names can be closed, we tightly link this question to the complexity of surjective CSPs. When also role names can be closed, we show that a full complexity classification is equivalent to classifying the complexity of all problems in coNP, thus currently out of reach. We also identify a class of OMQCs based on ontologies formulated in DL-LiteR that are guaranteed to be tractable and even FO-rewritable.