Abstract
A basic cornerstone of the Semantic Web are formal languages for describing resources in a clear and unambiguous way. Logical underpinnings facilitate automated reasoning about distributed knowledge on the Web and thus make it possible to derive only implicitly available information.
Much research is geared to advancing very expressive formalisms that add increasingly complex modelling constructs. However, this increase in language expressivity is often intrinsically linked to higher computational cost and often leads to formalisms that have high theoretical complexity and that are difficult to implement efficiently.
In contrast, reasoning in the context of the Web has a distinct set of requirements, namely inference systems that can scale to planetary-size datasets. A reduced level of expressivity is often sufficient for many practical scenarios and crucially, absolutely necessary when reasoning with such massive datasets. These requirements have been acknowledged by active research towards more lightweight formalisms and also by industrial implementations that often implement only tractable subsets of existing standards.
In this paper we aim to explore this trend and formulate a basic language, called L2, layered upon RDF as the data-model, that is inherently tractable, easy to implement on common rule engines and motivated by pragmatic considerations concerning the use of language constructs and the means to implement them.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O., et al.: The Semantic Web. Scientific American 284(5), 28–37 (2001)
Bizer, C., Heath, T., Ayers, D., Raimond, Y.: Interlinking Open Data on the Web. In: Demonstrations Track, 4th European Semantic Web Conference, Innsbruck, Austria (2007)
McGuinness, D., van Harmelen, F., et al.: OWL Web Ontology Language Overview. W3C Recommendation 10, 2004–03 (2004)
Brachman, R., Levesque, H.: The tractability of subsumption in frame-based description languages. In: Proc. of the 4th Nat. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1984), pp. 34–37 (1984)
Brickley, D., Guha, R.: RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema. W3C Recommendation 2 (2004)
Wang, T., Parsia, B., Hendler, J.: A Survey of the Web Ontology Landscape. In: Cruz, I., Decker, S., Allemang, D., Preist, C., Schwabe, D., Mika, P., Uschold, M., Aroyo, L.M. (eds.) ISWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4273, pp. 682–694. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Weithoner, T., Liebig, T., Luther, M., Bohm, S.: What’s Wrong with OWL Benchmarks? In: Second International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems, SSWS 2006 (2006)
Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Lembo, D., Lenzerini, M., Rosati, R.: DL-Lite: Tractable Description Logics for Ontologies. In: Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 20(2), p. 602 (2005)
Baader, F., Brandt, S., Lutz, C.: Pushing the EL Envelope Further. In: Proceedings of the OWLED Workshop (2008)
ter Horst, H.J.: Combining RDF and part of owl with rules: Semantics, decidability, complexity. In: Gil, Y., Motta, E., Benjamins, V.R., Musen, M.A. (eds.) ISWC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3729, pp. 668–684. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Krötzsch, M., Rudolph, S., Hitzler, P.: Elp: Tractable rules for owl 2. In: Sheth, A.P., Staab, S., Dean, M., Paolucci, M., Maynard, D., Finin, T., Thirunarayan, K. (eds.) ISWC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5318, pp. 649–664. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Parsia, B., Patel-Schneider, P., Sattler, U.: Next Steps for OWL. OWL Experienced and Directions (2006)
Horridge, M., Drummond, N., Goodwin, J., Rector, A., Stevens, R., Wang, H.: The Manchester OWL Syntax
Volz, R.: Web Ontology Reasoning with Logic Databases. PhD thesis, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Institut AIFB, D-76128 Karlsruhe (2004)
ter Horst, H.J.: Completeness, decidability and complexity of entailment for RDF schema and a semantic extension involving the owl vocabulary. J. Web Sem. 3(2-3), 79–115 (2005)
Klyne, G., Carroll, J., McBride, B.: Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax. W3C Recommendation 10 (2004)
Hayes, P., McBride, B.: RDF Semantics. W3C Recommendation 10 (2004)
Dantsin, E., Eiter, T., Gottlob, G., Voronkov, A.: Complexity and expressive power of logic programming. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 33(3), 374–425 (2001)
Schenkel, R., Theobald, A., Weikum, G.: Efficient Creation and Incremental Maintenance of the HOPI Index for Complex XML Document Collections. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering, 1998, vol. 21, p. 360. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2005)
Schenkel, R., Theobald, A., Weikum, G.: HOPI: An Efficient Connection Index for Complex XML Document Collections. In: Bertino, E., Christodoulakis, S., Plexousakis, D., Christophides, V., Koubarakis, M., Böhm, K., Ferrari, E. (eds.) EDBT 2004. LNCS, vol. 2992, pp. 237–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Wang, H., He, H., Yang, J., Yu, P., Yu, J.: Dual labeling: Answering graph reachability queries in constant time. In: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), p. 75 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fischer, F., Unel, G., Bishop, B., Fensel, D. (2010). Towards a Scalable, Pragmatic Knowledge Representation Language for the Web. In: Pnueli, A., Virbitskaite, I., Voronkov, A. (eds) Perspectives of Systems Informatics. PSI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11485-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11486-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)