Classic entrenchment-based contraction is not applicable to many useful logics, such as description logics. This is because the semantic construction refers to arbitrary disjunctions of formulas, while many logics do not fully support disjunction. In this paper, we present a new entrenchment-based contraction which does not rely on any logical connectives except conjunction. This contraction is applicable to all fragments of first-order logic that support conjunction. We provide a representation theorem for the contraction which shows that it satisfies all the AGM postulates except for the controversial Recovery Postulate, and is a natural generalisation of entrenchment-based contraction.

The integration of the various specialized components of cognitive systems poses a challenge, in particular for those architectures that combine planning, inference, and human-computer interaction (HCI). An approach is presented that exploits a single source of common knowledge contained in an ontology. Based upon the knowledge contained in it, specialized domain models for the cognitive systems' components can be generated automatically. Our integration targets planning in the form of hierarchical planning, being well-suited for HCI as it mimics planning done by humans. We show how the hierarchical structures of such planning domains can be (partially) inferred from declarative background knowledge. The same ontology furnishes the structure of the interaction between the cognitive system and the user. First, explanations of plans presented to users are enhanced by ontology explanations. Second, a dialog domain is created from the ontology coherent with the planning domain. We demonstrate the application of our technique in a fitness training scenario.

We study confidentiality enforcement in ontologies under the Controlled Query Evaluation framework, where a policy specifies the sensitive information and a censor ensures that query answers that may compromise the policy are not returned. We focus on censors that ensure confidentiality while maximising information access, and consider both Datalog and the OWL 2 profiles as ontology languages.

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.

Building ontologies is a difficult task requiring skills in logics and ontological analysis. Domain experts usually reach as far as organizing a set of concepts into a hierarchy in which the semantics of the relations is under-specified. The categorization of Wikipedia is a huge concept hierarchy of this form, covering a broad range of areas. We propose an automatic method for bootstrapping domain ontologies from the categories of Wikipedia. The method first selects a subset of concepts that are relevant for a given domain. The relevant concepts are subsequently split into classes and individuals, and, finally, the relations between the concepts are classified into subclass_of, instance_of, part_of, and generic related_to. We evaluate our method by generating ontology skeletons for the domains of Computing and Music. The quality of the generated ontologies has been measured against manually built ground truth datasets of several hundred nodes.

SPARQL is the de facto language for querying RDF data, since its standardization in 2008. A new version, called SPARQL 1.1, was released in 2013, with the aim of enriching the 2008 language with reasoning capabilities to deal with RDFS and OWL vocabularies, and a mechanism to express navigation patterns through regular expressions. However, SPARQL 1.1 is not powerful enough for expressing some relevant navigation patterns, and it misses a general form of recursion. In this work, we focus on OWL 2 QL and we propose TriQ-Lite 1.0, a tractable rule-based formalism that supports the above functionalities, and thus it can be used for querying RDF data. Unlike existing composite approaches, our formalism has simple syntax and semantics in the same spirit as good old Datalog.

Context-aware systems use data collected at runtime to recognize certain predefined situations and trigger adaptations. This can be implemented using ontology-based data access (OBDA), which augments classical query answering in databases by adopting the open-world assumption and including domain knowledge provided by an ontology. We investigate temporalized OBDA w.r.t. ontologies formulated in EL, a description logic that allows for efficient reasoning and is successfully used in practice. We consider a recently proposed temporalized query language that combines conjunctive queries with the operators of propositional linear temporal logic (LTL), and study both data and combined complexity of query entailment in this setting. We also analyze the satisfiability problem in the similar formalism EL-LTL.

Expressive query languages are gaining relevance in knowledge representation (KR), and new reasoning problems come to the fore. Especially query containment is interesting in this context. The problem is known to be decidable for many expressive query languages, but exact complexities are often missing. We introduce a new query language, guarded queries (GQ), which generalizes most known languages where query containment is decidable. GQs can be nested (more expressive), or restricted to linear recursion (less expressive). Our comprehensive analysis of the computational properties and expressiveness of (linear/nested) GQs also yields insights on many previous languages.

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.