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Towards a logical reconstruction of a theory for locally closed databases

Published: 30 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The Closed World Assumption (CWA) on databases expresses the assumption that an atom not in the database is false. This assumption is applicable only in cases where the database has complete knowledge about the domain of discourse. In this article, we investigate locally closed databases, that is: databases that are sound but partially incomplete about their domain. Such databases consist of a standard database instance, augmented with a collection of Local Closed World Assumptions (LCWAs). A LCWA is a “local” form of the CWA, expressing that a database relation is complete in a certain area, called a window of expertise. In this work, we study locally closed databases both from a knowledge representation and from a computational perspective. At the representation level, the approach taken in this article distinguishes between the data that is conveyed by a database and the metaknowledge about the area in which the data is complete. We study the semantics of the LCWA's and relate it to several knowledge representation formalisms. At the reasoning level, we study the complexity of, and algorithms for two basic reasoning tasks: computing certain and possible answers to queries and determining whether a database has complete knowledge on a query. As the complexity of these tasks is unacceptably high, we develop efficient approximate methods for query answering. We also prove that for useful classes of queries and locally closed databases, these methods are optimal, and thus they solve the original query in a tractable way. As a result, we obtain classes of queries and locally closed databases for which query answering is tractable.

Supplementary Material

Denecker Appendix (a22-denecker-apndx.pdf)
Online appendix to towards a logical reconstruction of a theory for locally closed databases on article 22.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ACM Transactions on Database Systems  Volume 35, Issue 3
July 2010
311 pages
ISSN:0362-5915
EISSN:1557-4644
DOI:10.1145/1806907
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Accepted: 01 April 2010
Revised: 01 November 2009
Received: 01 March 2009
Published: 30 July 2008
Published in TODS Volume 35, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Databases
  2. closed world assumption
  3. locally closed databases

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  • (2021)On the limits of machine knowledgeProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3476311.347640114:12(3175-3177)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2021
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