Recent years witnessed a rising interest towards Datalog-based ontological reasoning systems, both in academia and industry. These systems adopt languages, often shared under the collective name of Datalog$+/-$, that extend Datalog with the essential feature of existential quantification, while introducing syntactic limitations to sustain reasoning decidability and achieve a good trade-off between expressive power and computational complexity. From an implementation perspective, modern reasoners borrow the vast experience of the database community in developing streaming-based data processing systems, such as volcano-iterator architectures, that sustain a limited memory footprint and good scalability. In this paper, we focus on two extremely promising, expressive, and tractable languages, namely, Shy and Warded Datalog$+/-$. We leverage their theoretical underpinnings to introduce novel reasoning techniques, technically, "chase variants", that are particularly fit for efficient reasoning in streaming-based architectures. We then implement them in Vadalog, our reference streaming-based engine, to efficiently solve ontological reasoning tasks over real-world settings.

The ability of reasoning beyond data fitting is substantial to deep learning systems in order to make a leap forward towards artificial general intelligence. A lot of efforts have been made to model neural-based reasoning as an iterative decision-making process based on recurrent networks and reinforcement learning. Instead, inspired by the consciousness prior proposed by Yoshua Bengio, we explore reasoning with the notion of attentive awareness from a cognitive perspective, and formulate it in the form of attentive message passing on graphs, called neural consciousness flow (NeuCFlow). Aiming to bridge the gap between deep learning systems and reasoning, we propose an attentive computation framework with a three-layer architecture, which consists of an unconsciousness flow layer, a consciousness flow layer, and an attention flow layer. We implement the NeuCFlow model with graph neural networks (GNNs) and conditional transition matrices. Our attentive computation greatly reduces the complexity of vanilla GNN-based methods, capable of running on large-scale graphs. We validate our model for knowledge graph reasoning by solving a series of knowledge base completion (KBC) tasks. The experimental results show NeuCFlow significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art KBC methods, including the embedding-based and the path-based. The reproducible code can be found by the link below.

In our experience, some ontology users find it much easier to convey logical statements using rules rather than OWL (or description logic) axioms. Based on recent theoretical developments on transformations between rules and description logics, we develop ROWL, a Protege plugin that allows users to enter OWL axioms by way of rules; the plugin then automatically converts these rules into OWL DL axioms if possible, and prompts the user in case such a conversion is not possible without weakening the semantics of the rule.

The Singleton Property (SP) approach has been proposed for representing and querying metadata about RDF triples such as provenance, time, location, and evidence. In this approach, one singleton property is created to uniquely represent a relationship in a particular context, and in general, generates a large property hierarchy in the schema. It has become the subject of important questions from Semantic Web practitioners. Can an existing reasoner recognize the singleton property triples? And how? If the singleton property triples describe a data triple, then how can a reasoner infer this data triple from the singleton property triples? Or would the large property hierarchy affect the reasoners in some way? We address these questions in this paper and present our study about the reasoning aspects of the singleton properties. We propose a simple mechanism to enable existing reasoners to recognize the singleton property triples, as well as to infer the data triples described by the singleton property triples. We evaluate the effect of the singleton property triples in the reasoning processes by comparing the performance on RDF datasets with and without singleton properties. Our evaluation uses as benchmark the LUBM datasets and the LUBM-SP datasets derived from LUBM with temporal information added through singleton properties.

In this paper we consider the setting of graph-structured data that evolves as a result of operations carried out by users or applications. We study different reasoning problems, which range from ensuring the satisfaction of a given set of integrity constraints after a given sequence of updates, to deciding the (non-)existence of a sequence of actions that would take the data to an (un)desirable state, starting either from a specific data instance or from an incomplete description of it. We consider a simple action language in which actions are finite sequences of insertions and deletions of nodes and labels, and use Description Logics for describing integrity constraints and (partial) states of the data. We then formalize the data management problems mentioned above as a static verification problem and several planning problems. We provide algorithms and tight complexity bounds for the formalized problems, both for an expressive DL and for a variant of DL-Lite.

ABox abduction is an important reasoning mechanism for description logic ontologies. It computes all minimal explanations (sets of ABox assertions) whose appending to a consistent ontology enforces the entailment of an observation while keeps the ontology consistent. We focus on practical computation for a general problem of ABox abduction, called the query abduction problem, where an observation is a Boolean conjunctive query and the explanations may contain fresh individuals neither in the ontology nor in the observation. However, in this problem there can be infinitely many minimal explanations. Hence we first identify a class of TBoxes called first-order rewritable TBoxes. It guarantees the existence of finitely many minimal explanations and is sufficient for many ontology applications. To reduce the number of explanations that need to be computed, we introduce a special kind of minimal explanations called representative explanations from which all minimal explanations can be retrieved. We develop a tractable method (in data complexity) for computing all representative explanations in a consistent ontology. xperimental results demonstrate that the method is efficient and scalable for ontologies with large ABoxes.