Clemens Kupke

Stone coalgebras

We argue that the category of Stone spaces forms an interesting base category for coalgebras, in particular, if one considers the Vietoris functor as an analogue to the power set functor on the category of sets.We prove that the so-called descriptive general frames, which play a fundamental role in the semantics of modal logics, can be seen as Stone coalgebras in a natural way. This yields a duality between modal algebras and coalgebras for the Vietoris functor.Building on this idea, we introduce the notion of a Vietoris polynomial functor over the category of Stone spaces. For each such functor T we provide an adjunction between T-sorted Boolean algebras with operators and the Stone coalgebras for T. We also identify the subcategory of algebras on which the adjunction restricts to an equivalence and show that the final T-coalgebra is the dual of the initial T-BAO.

A Coalgebraic Perspective on Monotone Modal Logic

The paper has two main parts: First we make the connection between monotone modal logic and the general theory of coalgebras precise by defining functors UpP:Set->Set and UpV:Stone->Stone such that UpP- and UpV-coalgebras correspond to monotone neighbourhood frames and descriptive general monotone frames, respectively. Then we investigate the relationship between the coalgebraic notions of equivalence and monotone bisimulation. In particular, we show that the UpP-functor does not preserve weak pullbacks, and we prove interpolation for a number of monotone modal logics using results on UpP-bisimulations.

Neighbourhood Structures: Bisimilarity and Basic Model Theory

Neighbourhood structures are the standard semantic tool used to reason about non-normal modal logics. The logic of all neighbourhood models is called classical modal logic. In coalgebraic terms, a neighbourhood frame is a coalgebra for the contravariant powerset functor composed with itself, denoted by 2 2 . We use this coalgebraic modelling to derive notions of equivalence between neighbourhood structures. 2 2 -bisimilarity and behavioural equivalence are well known coalgebraic concepts, and they are distinct, since 2 2 does not preserve weak pullbacks. We introduce a third, intermediate notion whose wit- nessing relations we call precocongruences (based on pushouts). We give back-and-forth style characterisations for 2 2 -bisimulations and precocongruences, we show that on a single coalgebra, precocongruences capture behavioural equivalence, and that between neighbour- hood structures, precocongruences are a better approximation of behavioural equivalence than 2 2 -bisimulations. We also introduce a notion of modal saturation for neighbourhood models, and investigate its relationship with denability and image-niteness. We prove a Hennessy-Milner theorem for modally saturated and for image-nite neighbourhood mod- els. Our main results are an analogue of Van Benthems characterisation theorem and a model-theoretic proof of Craig interpolation for classical modal logic.

Acyclicity notions for existential rules and their application to query answering in ontologies

Answering conjunctive queries (CQs) over a set of facts extended with existential rules is a prominent problem in knowledge representation and databases. This problem can be solved using the chase algorithm, which extends the given set of facts with fresh facts in order to satisfy the rules. If the chase terminates, then CQs can be evaluated directly in the resulting set of facts. The chase, however, does not terminate necessarily, and checking whether the chase terminates on a given set of rules and facts is undecidable. Numerous acyclicity notions were proposed as sufficient conditions for chase termination. In this paper, we present two new acyclicity notions called model-faithful acyclicity (MFA) and model-summarising acyclicity (MSA). Furthermore, we investigate the landscape of the known acyclicity notions and establish a complete taxonomy of all notions known to us. Finally, we show that MFA and MSA generalise most of these notions. Existential rules are closely related to the Horn fragments of the OWL 2 ontology language; furthermore, several prominent OWL 2 reasoners implement CQ answering by using the chase to materialise all relevant facts. In order to avoid termination problems, many of these systems handle only the OWL 2 RL profile of OWL 2; furthermore, some systems go beyond OWL 2 RL, but without any termination guarantees. In this paper we also investigate whether various acyclicity notions can provide a principled and practical solution to these problems. On the theoretical side, we show that query answering for acyclic ontologies is of lower complexity than for general ontologies. On the practical side, we show that many of the commonly used OWL 2 ontologies are MSA, and that the number of facts obtained by materialisation is not too large. Our results thus suggest that principled development of materialisation-based OWL 2 reasoners is practically feasible.

Coalgebraic automata theory : basic results

We generalize some of the central results in automata theory to the abstraction level of coalgebras and thus lay out the foundations of a universal theory of automata operating on infinite objects. Let F be any set functor that preserves weak pullbacks. We show that the class of recognizable languages of F-coalgebras is closed under taking unions, intersections, and projections. We also prove that if a nondeterministic F-automaton accepts some coalgebra it accepts a finite one of the size of the automaton. Our main technical result concerns an explicit construction which transforms a given alternating F-automaton into an equivalent nondeterministic one, whose size is exponentially bound by the size of the original automaton.

Minimization via Duality

We show how to use duality theory to construct minimized versions of a wide class of automata. We work out three cases in detail: (a variant of) ordinary automata, weighted automata and probabilistic automata. The basic idea is that instead of constructing a maximal quotient we go to the dual and look for a minimal subalgebra and then return to the original category. Duality ensures that the minimal subobject becomes the maximally quotiented object.

Coalgebraic semantics of modal logics

Coalgebras can be seen as a natural abstraction of Kripke frames. In the same sense, coalgebraic logics are generalised modal logics. In this paper, we give an overview of the basic tools, techniques and results that connect coalgebras and modal logic. We argue that coalgebras unify the semantics of a large range of different modal logics (such as probabilistic, graded, relational, conditional) and discuss unifying approaches to reasoning at this level of generality. We review languages defined in terms of the so-called cover modality, languages induced by predicate liftings as well as their common categorical abstraction, and present (abstract) results on completeness, expressiveness and complexity in these settings, both for basic languages as well as a number of extensions, such as hybrid languages and fixpoints.

EXPTIME tableaux for the coalgebraic µ-calculus

The coalgebraic approach to modal logic provides a uniform framework that captures the semantics of a large class of structurally different modal logics, including e.g. graded and probabilistic modal logics and coalition logic. In this paper, we introduce the coalgebraic µ-calculus, an extension of the general (coalgebraic) framework with fixpoint operators. Our main results are completeness of the associated tableau calculus and EXPTIME decidability. Technically, this is achieved by reducing satisfiability to the existence of non-wellfounded tableaux, which is in turn equivalent to the existence of winning strategies in parity games. Our results are parametric in the underlying class of models and yield, as concrete applications, previously unknown complexity bounds for the probabilistic µ-calculus and for an extension of coalition logic with fixpoints.

Closure properties of coalgebra automata

We generalize some of the central results in automata theory to the abstraction level of coalgebras. In particular, we show that for any standard, weak pullback preserving functor F, the class of recognizable languages of F -coalgebras is closed under taking unions, intersections and projections. Our main technical result concerns a construction which transforms a given alternating F -automaton into an equivalent non-deterministic one.

COMPLETENESS FOR THE COALGEBRAIC COVER MODALITY

We study the finitary version of the coalgebraic logic introduced by L. Moss. The syntax of this logic, which is introduced uniformly with respect to a coalgebraic type functor, required to preserve weak pullbacks, extends that of classical propositional logic with a so-called coalgebraic cover modality depending on the type functor. Its semantics is defined in terms of a categorically defined relation lifting operation. As the main contributions of our paper we introduce a derivation system, and prove that it provides a sound and complete axiomatization for the collection of coalgebraically valid inequalities. Our soundness and completeness proof is algebraic, and we employ Pattinsons stratification method, showing that our derivation system can be stratified in countably many layers, corresponding to the modal depth of the formulas involved. In the proof of our main result we identify some new concepts and obtain some auxiliary results of independent interest. We survey properties of the notion of relation lifting, induced by an arbitrary but fixed set functor. We introduce a category of Boolean algebra presentations, and establish an adjunction between it and the category of Boolean algebras. Given the fact that our derivation system involves only formulas of depth one, it can be encoded as a endo-functor on Boolean algebras. We show that this functor is finitary and preserves embeddings, and we prove that the Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra of our logic can be identified with the initial algebra for this functor.