Temporal Query Entailment in the Description Logic SHQ

Abstract

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) generalizes query answering in databases towards deductive entailment since (i) the fact base is not assumed to contain complete knowledge (i.e., there is no closed world assumption), and (ii) the interpretation of the predicates occurring in the queries is constrained by axioms of an ontology. OBDA has been investigated in detail for the case where the ontology is expressed by an appropriate Description Logic (DL) and the queries are conjunctive queries. Motivated by situation awareness applications, we investigate an extension of OBDA to the temporal case. As the query language we consider an extension of the well-known propositional temporal logic LTL where conjunctive queries can occur in place of propositional variables, and as the ontology language we use the expressive DL SHQ. For the resulting instance of temporalized OBDA, we investigate both data complexity and combined complexity of the query entailment problem. In the course of this investigation, we also establish the complexity of consistency of Boolean knowledge bases in SHQ.

Keywords: Description Logic, Ontology-based data access, Linear temporal logic, Complexity, Data complexity