Wu

We develop a novel absorption technique for large collections of factual assertions about individual objects. These assertions are commonly accompanied by implicit background knowledge and form a knowledge base. Both the assertions and the background knowledge are expressed in a suitable language of Description Logic and queries over such knowledge bases can be expressed as assertion retrieval queries. The proposed absorption technique significantly improves the performance of such queries, in particular in cases where a large number of object features are known for the objects represented in such a knowledge base. In addition to the absorption technique we present the results of a preliminary experimental evaluation that validates the efficacy of the proposed optimization.