Active Integrity Constraints for Multi-Context Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a formalism for integrating integrity constraints with corrective actions in multi-context systems, enabling systematic repair of inconsistencies across diverse knowledge bases, including ontologies.

Contribution

It generalizes active integrity constraints to multi-context systems, introducing algorithms for finding grounded repairs based on repair suggestions within this framework.

Findings

Applicable to ontologies and diverse knowledge bases

Enables systematic repair of inconsistencies

Defines algorithms for grounded repairs

Abstract

We introduce a formalism to couple integrity constraints over general-purpose knowledge bases with actions that can be executed to restore consistency. This formalism generalizes active integrity constraints over databases. In the more general setting of multi-context systems, adding repair suggestions to integrity constraints allows defining simple iterative algorithms to find all possible grounded repairs - repairs for the global system that follow the suggestions given by the actions in the individual rules. We apply our methodology to ontologies, and show that it can express most relevant types of integrity constraints in this domain.