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International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems

RR 2007: Web Reasoning and Rule Systems pp 194–208Cite as

Consistent Query Answering over Description Logic Ontologies

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4524))

Abstract

Description Logics (DLs) have been widely used in the last years as formal language for specifying ontologies over the web. Due to the dynamic nature of this setting, it may frequently happen that data retrieved from the web contradict the intensional knowledge provided by the ontology through which they are collected, which therefore may result inconsistent. In this paper, we analyze the problem of consistent query answering over DL ontologies, i.e., the problem of providing meaningful answers to queries posed over inconsistent ontologies. We provide inconsistency tolerant semantics for DLs, and study the computational complexity of consistent query answering over ontologies specified in DL-Lite, a family of DLs specifically tailored to deal with large amounts of data. We show that the above problem is coNP-complete w.r.t. data complexity, i.e., the complexity measured w.r.t. the size of the data only. Towards identification of tractable cases of consistent query answering over DL-Lite ontologies, we then study the problem of consistent instance checking, i.e., the instance checking problem considered under our inconsistency-tolerant semantics. We provide an algorithm for it which runs in time polynomial in the size of the data, thus showing that the problem is in PTime w.r.t. data complexity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198 Roma, Italy

    Domenico Lembo & Marco Ruzzi

Authors
  1. Domenico Lembo
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  2. Marco Ruzzi
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Massimo Marchiori Jeff Z. Pan Christian de Sainte Marie

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Lembo, D., Ruzzi, M. (2007). Consistent Query Answering over Description Logic Ontologies. In: Marchiori, M., Pan, J.Z., Marie, C.d.S. (eds) Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. RR 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4524. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72982-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72982-2_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-72981-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-72982-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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