Formal foundations for RDF/S KB evolution

Abstract

There are ongoing efforts to provide declarative formalisms of integrity constraints over RDF/S data. In this context, addressing the evolution of RDF/S knowledge bases while respecting associated constraints is a challenging issue, yet to receive a formal treatment. We provide a theoretical framework for dealing with both schema and data change requests. We define the notion of a rational change operator as one that satisfies the belief revision principles of Success, Validity and Minimal Change. The semantics of such an operator are subject to customization, by tuning the properties that a rational change should adhere to. We prove some interesting theoretical results and propose a general-purpose algorithm for implementing rational change operators in knowledge bases with integrity constraints, which allows us to handle uniformly any possible change request in a provably rational and consistent manner. Then, we apply our framework to a well-studied RDF/S variant, for which we suggest a specific notion of minimality. For efficiency purposes, we also describe specialized versions of the general evolution algorithm for the RDF/S case, which provably have the same semantics as the general-purpose one for a limited set of (useful in practice) types of change requests.

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