Updating RDFS ABoxes and TBoxes in SPARQL

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of updating RDFS ABoxes and TBoxes in RDF stores using SPARQL, proposing a formal framework and strategies for handling entailment regimes during updates.

Contribution

It introduces a formal fragment of SPARQL for updating RDFS ontologies, covering both materialised and reduced RDF store semantics.

Findings

Defines a SPARQL update fragment for RDFS ABoxes and TBoxes.

Discusses semantics and implementation strategies for updates.

Addresses gap in standard treatment of entailment regimes during updates.

Abstract

Updates in RDF stores have recently been standardised in the SPARQL 1.1 Update specification. However, computing answers entailed by ontologies in triple stores is usually treated orthogonal to updates. Even the W3C's recent SPARQL 1.1 Update language and SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes specifications explicitly exclude a standard behaviour how SPARQL endpoints should treat entailment regimes other than simple entailment in the context of updates. In this paper, we take a first step to close this gap. We define a fragment of SPARQL basic graph patterns corresponding to (the RDFS fragment of) DL-Lite and the corresponding SPARQL update language, dealing with updates both of ABox and of TBox statements. We discuss possible semantics along with potential strategies for implementing them. We treat both, (i) materialised RDF stores, which store all entailed triples explicitly, and (ii) reduced RDF Stores, that is, redundancy-free RDF stores that do not store any RDF triples (corresponding to DL-Lite ABox statements) entailed by others already.