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.

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.

Fuzzy Description Logics (DLs) are used to represent and reason about vague and imprecise knowledge that is inherent to many application domains. It was recently shown that the complexity of reasoning in finitely valued fuzzy DLs is often not higher than that of the underlying classical DL. We show that this does not hold for fuzzy extensions of the light-weight DL EL, which is used in many biomedical ontologies, under the Lukasiewicz semantics. The complexity of reasoning increases from PTime to ExpTime, even if only one additional truth value is introduced. The same lower bound holds also for infinitely valued Lukasiewicz extensions of EL.

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.

Baader et al., 2013; Borgwardt et al., 2013; Özcep et al., 2013; Klarman and Meyer, 2014] and shown to preserve query Aiming at ontology-based data access over temporal, rewritability. Note, however, that the inability to define temporal in particular streaming data, we design a language of predicates such as Blizzard(x, t) in ontologies leaves the ontology-mediated queries by extending OWL 2 QL burden of encoding them within queries to the user, which and SPARQL with temporal operators, and investigate goes against the OBDA paradigm. Moreover, natural queries rewritability of these queries into two-sorted such as'check if a weather station has been serviced every 24 first-order logic with and PLUS over time.

Ontology matching is the process of finding semantic correspondences between entities from different ontologies. As an effective solution to linking different heterogeneous ontologies, ontology matching has attracted considerable attentions in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based approach to ontology matching problem. Different from previous work, we formulate ontology matching as a random walk process on the association graph constructed from the to-be-matched ontologies. In particular, two variants of the conventional random walk process, namely, Affinity-Preserving Random Walk (APRW) and Mapping-Oriented Random Walk (MORW), have been proposed to alleviate the adverse effect of the false-mapping nodes in the association graph and to incorporate the 1-to-1 matching constraints presumed in ontology matching, respectively. Experiments on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) datasets show that our approach achieves a competitive performance when compared with state-of-the-art systems, even though our approach does not utilize any external resources.

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.

In dynamic settings where data is exposed by streams, knowledge discovery aims at learning associations of data across streams. In the semantic Web, streams expose their meaning through evolutive versions of ontologies. Such settings pose challenges of scalability for discovering (a posteriori) knowledge. In our work, the semantics, identifying knowledge similarity and rarity in streams, together with incremental, approximate maintenance, control scalability while preserving accuracy of streams associations (as semantic rules) discovery.

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.

Hierarchies of concepts are useful in many applications from navigation to organization of objects. Usually, a hierarchy is created in a centralized manner by employing a group of domain experts, a time-consuming and expensive process. The experts often design one single hierarchy to best explain the semantic relationships among the concepts, and ignore the natural uncertainty that may exist in the process. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing system to build a hierarchy and furthermore capture the underlying uncertainty. Our system maintains a distribution over possible hierarchies and actively selects questions to ask using an information gain criterion. We evaluate our methodology on simulated data and on a set of real world application domains. Experimental results show that our system is robust to noise, efficient in picking questions, cost-effective, and builds high quality hierarchies.