eSPARQL: Representing and Reconciling Agnostic and Atheistic Beliefs in RDF-star Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR

The paper introduces eSPARQL, a novel query language for RDF-star knowledge graphs that handles multiple, conflicting, and nested beliefs using a four-valued logic, enhancing the representation and querying of epistemic information.

Contribution

It proposes eSPARQL, a new query language extending SPARQL-star with a four-valued logic and a FROM clause to manage complex belief scenarios in RDF-star graphs.

Findings

eSPARQL can express queries about individual beliefs and conflicts.

It supports aggregation and nesting of beliefs.

The language enables querying beliefs about beliefs.

Abstract

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of large knowledge graphs combining information from multiple sources. Sometimes, this information is provided in the form of assertions about other assertions, defining contexts where assertions are valid. A recent extension to RDF which admits statements over statements, called RDF-star, is in revision to become a W3C standard. However, there is no proposal for a semantics of these RDF-star statements nor a built-in facility to operate over them. In this paper, we propose a query language for epistemic RDF-star metadata based on a four-valued logic, called eSPARQL. Our proposed query language extends SPARQL-star, the query language for RDF-star, with a new type of FROM clause to facilitate operating with multiple and sometimes conflicting beliefs. We show that the proposed query language can express four use case queries, including the following features: (i) querying the belief of an individual, (ii) the aggregating of beliefs, (iii) querying who is conflicting with somebody, and (iv) beliefs about beliefs (i.e., nesting of beliefs).