Vladislav Ryzhikov

Reasoning over extended ER models

We investigate the computational complexity of reasoning over various fragments of the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) language, which includes a number of constructs: ISA between entities and relationships, disjointness and covering of entities and relationships, cardinality constraints for entities in relationships and their refinements as well as multiplicity constraints for attributes. We extend the known EXPTIME-completeness result for UML class diagrams [5] and show that reasoning over EER diagrams with ISA between relationships is EXPTIME-complete even without relationship covering. Surprisingly, reasoning becomes NP-complete when we drop ISA between relationships (while still allowing all types of constraints on entities). If we further omit disjointness and covering over entities, reasoning becomes polynomial. Our lower complexity bound results are proved by direct reductions, while the upper bounds follow from the correspondences with expressive variants of the description logic DL-Lite, which we establish in this paper. These correspondences also show the usefulness of DL-Lite as a language for reasoning over conceptual models and ontologies.

A Cookbook for Temporal Conceptual Data Modelling with Description Logics

We design temporal description logics (TDLs) suitable for reasoning about temporal conceptual data models and investigate their computational complexity. Our formalisms are based on DL-Lite logics with three types of concept inclusions (ranging from atomic concept inclusions and disjointness to the full Booleans), as well as cardinality constraints and role inclusions. The logics are interpreted over the Cartesian products of object domains and the flow of time (ℤ, <), satisfying the constant domain assumption. Concept and role inclusions of the TBox hold at all moments of time (globally), and data assertions of the ABox hold at specified moments of time. To express temporal constraints of conceptual data models, the languages are equipped with flexible and rigid roles, standard future and past temporal operators on concepts, and operators “always” and “sometime” on roles. The most expressive of our TDLs (which can capture lifespan cardinalities and either qualitative or quantitative evolution constraints) turns out to be undecidable. However, by omitting some of the temporal operators on concepts/roles or by restricting the form of concept inclusions, we construct logics whose complexity ranges between NLogSpace and PSpace. These positive results are obtained by reduction to various clausal fragments of propositional temporal logic, which opens a way to employ propositional or first-order temporal provers for reasoning about temporal data models.

The Complexity of Clausal Fragments of LTL

We introduce and investigate a number of fragments of propositional temporal logic LTL over the flow of time (ℤ, <). The fragments are defined in terms of the available temporal operators and the structure of the clausal normal form of the temporal formulas. We determine the computational complexity of the satisfiability problem for each of the fragments, which ranges from NLogSpace to PTime, NP and PSpace.

DL-Lite with attributes and datatypes

We extend the DL-Lite languages by means of attributes and datatypes. Attributes—a notion borrowed from data models— associate concrete values from datatypes to abstract objects and in this way complement roles, which describe relationships between abstract objects. The extended languages remain tractable (with a notable exception) even though they contain both existential and (a limited form of) universal quantification. We present complexity results for two most important reasoning problems in DL-Lite: combined complexity of knowledge base satisfiability and data complexity of positive existential query answering.

Complexity of reasoning over temporal data models

We investigate the computational complexity of reasoning over temporal extensions of conceptual data models. The temporal conceptual models we analyse include the standard UML/EER constructs, such as ISA between entities and relationships, disjointness and covering, cardinality constraints and their refinements, multiplicity and key constraints; in the temporal dimension, we have timestamping, evolution, transition and lifespan cardinality constraints. We give a nearly comprehensive picture of the impact of these constructs on the complexity of reasoning, which can range from NLOGSPACE to undecidability.

Knowledge base exchange

In this article, we define and study the problem of exchanging knowledge between a source and a target knowledge base (KB), connected through mappings. Differently from the traditional database exchange setting, which considers only the exchange of data, we are interested in exchanging implicit knowledge. As representation formalism we use Description Logics (DLs), thus assuming that the source and target KBs are given as a DL TBox+ABox, while the mappings have the form of DL TBox assertions. We define a general framework of KB exchange, and study the problem of translating the knowledge in the source KB according to the mappings expressed in OWLź2źQL, the profile of the standard Web Ontology Language OWL 2 based on the description logic DL-Lite R . We develop novel game- and automata-theoretic techniques, and we provide complexity results that range from NLogSpace to ExpTime.

DL-Lite with temporalised concepts, rigid axioms and roles

We investigate the temporal extension of the description logic DL-Litebool(RN) with the until operator on concepts, rigid (time-independent) and local (time-dependent) roles, and rigid TBox axioms. Using an embedding into the one-variable fragment of first-order temporal logic and the quasimodel technique, we prove that (i) the satisfiability problem for the resulting logic is PSpace-complete, and that (ii) by weakening until to sometime in the future we obtain an NP-complete logic, which matches the complexities of the propositional linear-time temporal logics with the corresponding temporal operators.

Inseparability and conservative extensions of description logic ontologies: A survey

The question whether an ontology can safely be replaced by another, possibly simpler, one is fundamental for many ontology engineering and maintenance tasks. It underpins, for example, ontology versioning, ontology modularization, forgetting, and knowledge exchange. What ‘safe replacement’ means depends on the intended application of the ontology. If, for example, it is used to query data, then the answers to any relevant ontology-mediated query should be the same over any relevant data set; if, in contrast, the ontology is used for conceptual reasoning, then the entailed subsumptions between concept expressions should coincide. This gives rise to different notions of ontology inseparability such as query inseparability and concept inseparability, which generalize corresponding notions of conservative extensions. In this chapter, we survey results on various notions of inseparability in the context of description logic ontologies, discussing their applications, useful model-theoretic characterizations, algorithms for determining whether two ontologies are inseparable (and, sometimes, for computing the difference between them if they are not), and the computational complexity of this problem.

Games for query inseparability of description logic knowledge bases

We consider conjunctive query inseparability of description logic knowledge bases with respect to a given signature-a fundamental problem in knowledge base versioning, module extraction, forgetting and knowledge exchange. We give a uniform game-theoretic characterisation of knowledge base conjunctive query inseparability and develop worst-case optimal decision algorithms for fragments of Horn- ALCHI , including the description logics underpinning OWL?2?QL and OWL?2?EL. We also determine the data and combined complexity of deciding query inseparability. While query inseparability for all of these logics is P-complete for data complexity, the combined complexity ranges from P- to ExpTime- to 2ExpTime-completeness. We use these results to resolve two major open problems for OWL?2?QL by showing that TBox query inseparability and the membership problem for universal conjunctive query solutions in knowledge exchange are both ExpTime-complete for combined complexity. Finally, we introduce a more flexible notion of inseparability which compares answers to conjunctive queries in a given signature over a given set of individuals. In this case, checking query inseparability becomes NP-complete for data complexity, but the ExpTime- and 2ExpTime-completeness combined complexity results are preserved.

The Complexity of Ontology-Based Data Access with OWL 2 QL and Bounded Treewidth Queries

Our concern is the overhead of answering OWL 2 QL ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) in ontology-based data access compared to evaluating their underlying tree-shaped and, more generally, bounded treewidth conjunctive queries (CQs). We show that OMQs with bounded depth ontologies have nonrecursive datalog (NDL) rewritings that can be constructed and evaluated in LOGCFL for combined complexity, and even in NL if their CQs are tree-shaped with a bounded number of leaves. Thus, such OMQs incur no overhead in complexity-theoretic terms. For OMQs with arbitrary ontologies and bounded-leaf tree-shaped CQs, NDL-rewritings are constructed and evaluated in LOGCFL. We experimentally demonstrate feasibility and scalability of our rewritings compared to previously proposed NDL-rewritings. On the negative side, we prove that answering OMQs with tree-shaped CQs is not fixed-parameter tractable if the ontology depth or the number of leaves in the CQs is regarded as the parameter, and that answering OMQs with a fixed ontology (of infinite depth) is NP-complete for tree-shaped CQs and LOGCFL-complete for bounded-leaf CQs.