The Shapley value, originating from cooperative game theory, has been employed to define responsibility measures that quantify the contributions of database facts to obtaining a given query answer. For non-numeric queries, this is done by considering a cooperative game whose players are the facts and whose wealth function assigns 1 or 0 to each subset of the database, depending on whether the query answer holds in the given subset. While conceptually simple, this approach suffers from a notable drawback: the problem of computing such Shapley values is #P-hard in data complexity, even for simple conjunctive queries. This motivates us to revisit the question of what constitutes a reasonable responsibility measure and to introduce a new family of responsibility measures -- weighted sums of minimal supports (WSMS) -- which satisfy intuitive properties. Interestingly, while the definition of WSMSs is simple and bears no obvious resemblance to the Shapley value formula, we prove that every WSMS measure can be equivalently seen as the Shapley value of a suitably defined cooperative game. Moreover, WSMS measures enjoy tractable data complexity for a large class of queries, including all unions of conjunctive queries. We further explore the combined complexity of WSMS computation and establish (in)tractability results for various subclasses of conjunctive queries.

This paper revisits the problem of repairing and querying inconsistent databases equipped with universal constraints. We adopt symmetric difference repairs, in which both deletions and additions of facts can be used to restore consistency, and suppose that preferred repair actions are specified via a binary priority relation over (negated) facts. Our first contribution is to show how existing notions of optimal repairs, defined for simpler denial constraints and repairs solely based on fact deletion, can be suitably extended to our richer setting. We next study the computational properties of the resulting repair notions, in particular, the data complexity of repair checking and inconsistency-tolerant query answering. Finally, we clarify the relationship between optimal repairs of prioritized databases and repair notions introduced in the framework of active integrity constraints. In particular, we show that Pareto-optimal repairs in our setting correspond to founded, grounded and justified repairs w.r.t. the active integrity constraints obtained by translating the prioritized database. Our study also yields useful insights into the behavior of active integrity constraints.

In the recently proposed Lace framework for collective entity resolution, logical rules and constraints are used to identify pairs of entity references (e.g. author or paper ids) that denote the same entity. This identification is global: all occurrences of those entity references (possibly across multiple database tuples) are deemed equal and can be merged. By contrast, a local form of merge is often more natural when identifying pairs of data values, e.g. some occurrences of 'J. Smith' may be equated with 'Joe Smith', while others should merge with 'Jane Smith'. This motivates us to extend Lace with local merges of values and explore the computational properties of the resulting formalism.

We investigate practical algorithms for inconsistency-tolerant query answering over prioritized knowledge bases, which consist of a logical theory, a set of facts, and a priority relation between conflicting facts. We consider three well-known semantics (AR, IAR and brave) based upon two notions of optimal repairs (Pareto and completion). Deciding whether a query answer holds under these semantics is (co)NP-complete in data complexity for a large class of logical theories, and SAT-based procedures have been devised for repair-based semantics when there is no priority relation, or the relation has a special structure. The present paper introduces the first SAT encodings for Pareto- and completion-optimal repairs w.r.t. general priority relations and proposes several ways of employing existing and new encodings to compute answers under (optimal) repair-based semantics, by exploiting different reasoning modes of SAT solvers. The comprehensive experimental evaluation of our implementation compares both (i) the impact of adopting semantics based on different kinds of repairs, and (ii) the relative performances of alternative procedures for the same semantics.

We study FO-rewritability of conjunctive queries in the presence of ontologies formulated in a description logic between EL and Horn-SHIF, along with related query containment problems. Apart from providing characterizations, we establish complexity results ranging from ExpTime via NExpTime to 2ExpTime, pointing out several interesting effects. In particular, FO-rewriting is more complex for conjunctive queries than for atomic queries when inverse roles are present, but not otherwise.

Ontology-mediated query answering (OMQA) is a promising approach to data access and integration that has been actively studied in the knowledge representation and database communities for more than a decade. The vast majority of work on OMQA focuses on conjunctive queries, whereas more expressive queries that feature counting or other forms of aggregation remain largely unex-plored. In this paper, we introduce a general form of counting query, relate it to previous proposals, and study the complexity of answering such queries in the presence of DL-Lite ontologies. As it follows from existing work that query answering is intractable and often of high complexity, we consider some practically relevant restrictions, for which we establish improved complexity bounds.

Several inconsistency-tolerant semantics have been introduced for querying inconsistent description logic knowledge bases. The first contribution of this paper is a practical approach for computing the query answers under three well-known such semantics, namely the AR, IAR and brave semantics, in the lightweight description logic DL-LiteR. We show that query answering under the intractable AR semantics can be performed efficiently by using IAR and brave semantics as tractable approximations and encoding the AR entailment problem as a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem. The second issue tackled in this work is explaining why a tuple is a (non-)answer to a query under these semantics. We define explanations for positive and negative answers under the brave, AR and IAR semantics. We then study the computational properties of explanations in DL-LiteR. For each type of explanation, we analyze the data complexity of recognizing (preferred) explanations and deciding if a given assertion is relevant or necessary. We establish tight connections between intractable explanation problems and variants of SAT, enabling us to generate explanations by exploiting solvers for Boolean satisfaction and optimization problems. Finally, we empirically study the efficiency of our query answering and explanation framework using a benchmark we built upon the well-established LUBM benchmark.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of synthesizing strategies for linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications that are interpreted over finite traces -- a problem that is central to the automated construction of controllers, robot programs, and business processes. We study a natural variant of the finite LTL synthesis problem in which strategy guarantees are predicated on specified environment behavior. We further explore a quantitative extension of LTL that supports specification of quality measures, utilizing it to synthesize high-quality strategies. We propose new notions of optimality and associated algorithms that yield strategies that best satisfy specified quality measures. Our algorithms utilize an automata-game approach, positioning them well for future implementation via existing state-of-the-art techniques.

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-Lite-R) 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.

The problem The need to equip reasoning systems with explanation services of querying such KBs using database-style queries (in is widely acknowledged by the DL community (see particular, conjunctive queries) has been a major focus of Section 6 for discussion and references), and such facilities recent DL research. Since scalability is a key concern, much are all the more essential when using inconsistency-tolerant of the work has focused on lightweight DLs for which query semantics, as recently argued in (Arioua et al. 2014). Indeed, answering can be performed in polynomial time w.r.t. the the brave, AR, and IAR semantics allow one to classify size of the ABox. The DL-Lite family of lightweight DLs query answers into three categories of increasing reliability, (Calvanese et al. 2007) is especially popular due to the fact and a user may naturally wonder why a given tuple was assigned that query answering can be reduced, via query rewriting, to to, or excluded from, one of these categories.