Certain Answers to a SPARQL Query over a Knowledge Base (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper develops a new semantics for SPARQL query answering over knowledge bases that unifies certain answers and standard SPARQL interpretation, satisfying multiple formal requirements.

Contribution

It formalizes requirements for semantics that unify certain answers and SPARQL answers, and defines a semantics meeting these for complex queries over DL-Lite R knowledge bases.

Findings

A semantics satisfying all formal requirements for SELECT, UNION, OPTIONAL queries.

Matching known upper bounds for query answering complexity over DL-Lite R.

Extension of query answering capabilities to more expressive SPARQL fragments.

Abstract

Ontology-Mediated Query Answering (OMQA) is a well-established framework to answer queries over an RDFS or OWL Knowledge Base (KB). OMQA was originally designed for unions of conjunctive queries (UCQs), and based on certain answers. More recently, OMQA has been extended to SPARQL queries, but to our knowledge, none of the efforts made in this direction (either in the literature, or the so-called SPARQL entailment regimes) is able to capture both certain answers for UCQs and the standard interpretation of SPARQL over a plain graph. We formalize these as requirements to be met by any semantics aiming at conciliating certain answers and SPARQL answers, and define three additional requirements, which generalize to KBs some basic properties of SPARQL answers. Then we show that a semantics can be defined that satisfies all requirements for SPARQL queries with SELECT, UNION, and OPTIONAL, and for DLs with the canonical model property. We also investigate combined complexity for query answering under such a semantics over DL-Lite R KBs. In particular, we show for different fragments of SPARQL that known upper-bounds for query answering over a plain graph are matched.