Standard automated planning employs first-order formulas under closed-world semantics to achieve a goal with a given set of actions from an initial state. We follow a line of research that aims to incorporate background knowledge into automated planning problems, for example, by means of ontologies, which are usually interpreted under open-world semantics. We present a new approach for planning with DL-Lite ontologies that combines the advantages of ontology-based action conditions provided by explicit-input knowledge and action bases (eKABs) and ontology-aware action effects under the coherence update semantics. We show that the complexity of the resulting formalism is not higher than that of previous approaches and provide an implementation via a polynomial compilation into classical planning. An evaluation of existing and new benchmarks examines the performance of a planning system on different variants of our compilation.

In this paper, we address the problem of handling inconsistent data in Temporal Description Logic (TDL) knowledge bases. Considering the data part of the knowledge base as the source of inconsistency over time, we propose an ABox repair approach. This is the first work handling the repair in TDL Knowledge bases. To do so, our goal is twofold: 1) detect temporal inconsistencies and 2) propose a data temporal reparation. For the inconsistency detection, we propose a reduction approach from TDL to DL which allows to provide a tight NP-complete upper bound for TDL concept satisfiability and to use highly optimised DL reasoners that can bring precise explanation (the set of inconsistent data assertions). Thereafter, from the obtained explanation, we propose a method for automatically computing the best repair in the temporal setting based on the allowed rigid predicates and the time order of assertions.

In this paper we study instance-level update in DL-LiteA , a well-known description logic that influenced the OWL 2 QL standard. Instance-level update regards insertions and deletions in the ABox of an ontology. In particular we focus on formula-based approaches to instance-level update. We show that DL-LiteA , which is well-known for enjoying first-order rewritability of query answering, enjoys a first-order rewritability property also for instance-level update. That is, every update can be reformulated into a set of insertion and deletion instructions computable through a non-recursive Datalog program with negation. Such a program is readily translatable into a first-order query over the ABox considered as a database, and hence into SQL. By exploiting this result, we implement an update component for DL-LiteA-based systems and perform some experiments showing that the approach works in practice.

Knowledge bases (KBs) are not static entities: new information constantly appears and some of the previous knowledge becomes obsolete. In order to reflect this evolution of knowledge, KBs should be expanded with the new knowledge and contracted from the obsolete one. This problem is well-studied for propositional but much less for first-order KBs. In this work we investigate knowledge expansion and contraction for KBs expressed in DL-Lite, a family of description logics (DLs) that underlie the tractable fragment OWL 2 QL of the Web Ontology Language OWL 2. We start with a novel knowledge evolution framework and natural postulates that evolution should respect, and compare our postulates to the well-established AGM postulates. We then review well-known model and formula-based approaches for expansion and contraction for propositional theories and show how they can be adapted to the case of DL-Lite. In particular, we show intrinsic limitations of model-based approaches: besides the fact that some of them do not respect the postulates we have established, they ignore the structural properties of KBs. This leads to undesired properties of evolution results: evolution of DL-Lite KBs cannot be captured in DL-Lite. Moreover, we show that well-known formula-based approaches are also not appropriate for DL-Lite expansion and contraction: they either have a high complexity of computation, or they produce logical theories that cannot be expressed in DL-Lite. Thus, we propose a novel formula-based approach that respects our principles and for which evolution is expressible in DL-Lite. For this approach we also propose polynomial time deterministic algorithms to compute evolution of DL-Lite KBs when evolution affects only factual data.

While the amount of data stored in current information systems continuously grows, and the processes making use of such data become more and more complex, extracting knowledge and getting insights from these data, as well as governing both data and the associated processes, are still challenging tasks. The problem is complicated by the proliferation of data sources and services both within a single organization, and in cooperating environments. Effectively accessing, integrating and managing data in complex organizations is still one of the main issues faced by the information technology industry today. Indeed, it is not surprising that data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation phase of a project, compared with the data minining and knowledge discovery phase. Whether you call it data wrangling, data munging, or data integration, it is estimated that 50%-80% of a data scientists time is spent on collecting and organizing data for analysis. If we consider that in any complex organization, data governance is also essential for tasks other than data analytics, we can conclude that the challenge of identifying, gathering, retaining, and providing access to all relevant data for the business at an acceptable cost, is huge.

Evolution of Knowledge Bases (KBs) consists of incorporating new information in an existing KB. Previous studies assume that the new information should be fully trusted and thus completely incorporated in the old knowledge. We suggest a setting where the new knowledge can be partially trusted and develop model-based approaches (MBAs) to KB evolution that rely on this assumption. Under MBAs the result of evolution is a set of interpretations and thus two core problems for MBAs are closure, i.e., whether evolution result can be axiomatised with a KB, and approximation, i.e., whether it can be (maximally) approximated with a KB. We show that DL-Lite is not closed under a wide range of trust-sensitive MBAs. We introduce a notion of s-approximation that improves the previously proposed approximations and show how to compute it for various trust-sensitive MBAs.

Artifact-centric models for business processes recently raised a lot of attention, as they manage to combine structural (i.e. data related) with dynamical (i.e. process related) aspects in a seamless way. Many frameworks developed under this approach, although, are not built explicitly for planning, one of the most prominent operations related to business processes. In this paper, we try to overcome this by proposing a framework named Dynamic Knowledge Bases, aimed at describing rich business domains through Description Logic-based ontologies, and where a set of actions allows the system to evolve by modifying such ontologies. This framework, by offering action rewriting and knowledge partialization, represents a viable and formal environment to develop decision making and planning techniques for DL-based artifact-centric business domains.

Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) have been recently proposed as a formal framework to capture the dynamics of systems which manipulate Description Logic (DL) Knowledge Bases (KBs) through action execution. In this work, we enrich the KAB setting with contextual information, making use of different context dimensions. On the one hand, context is determined by the environment using context-changing actions that make use of the current state of the KB and the current context. On the other hand, it affects the set of TBox assertions that are relevant at each time point, and that have to be considered when processing queries posed over the KAB. Here we extend to our enriched setting the results on verification of rich temporal properties expressed in mu-calculus, which had been established for standard KABs. Specifically, we show that under a run-boundedness condition, verification stays decidable.

Two essential tasks in managing Description Logic (DL) ontologies are eliminating problematic axioms and incorporating newly formed axioms. Such elimination and incorporation are formalised as the operations of contraction and revision in belief change.In this paper, we deal with contraction and revision for the DL-Lite family through a model-theoretic approach.Standard DL semantics yields infinite numbers of models for DL-Lite TBoxes, thus it is not practical to develop algorithms for contraction and revision that involve DL models. The key to our approach is the introduction of an alternative semantics called type semantics which is more succinct than DL semantics. More importantly, with a finite signature, type semantics always yields finite humber of models.We then define model-based contraction and revision for DL-Lite TBoxesunder type semantics and provide representation theorems for them.Finally, the succinctness of type semantics allows us to develop tractable algorithms for both operations.

Answer set programs (ASP) with external evaluations are a declarative means to capture advanced applications. However, their evaluation can be expensive due to external source accesses. In this paper we consider HEX-programs that provide external atoms as a bidirectional interface to external sources and present a novel evaluation method based on support sets, which informally are portions of the input to an external atom that will determine its output for any completion of the partial input. Support sets allow one to shortcut the external source access, which can be completely eliminated. This is particularly attractive if a compact representation of suitable support sets is efficiently constructible. We discuss some applications with this property, among them description logic programs over DL-Lite ontologies, and present experimental results showing that support sets can significantly improve efficiency.