Temporal annotations of facts are a key component both for building a high-accuracy knowledge base and for answering queries over the resulting temporal knowledge base with high precision and recall. In this paper, we present a temporalprobabilistic database model for cleaning uncertain temporal facts obtained from information extraction methods. Specifically, we consider a combination of temporal deduction rules, temporal consistency constraints and probabilistic inference based on the common possible-worlds semantics with data lineage, and we study the theoretical properties of this data model. We further develop a query engine which is capable of scaling to very large temporal knowledge bases, with nearly interactive query response times over millions of uncertain facts and hundreds of thousands of grounded rules. Our experiments over two real-world datasets demonstrate the increased robustness of our approach compared to related techniques based on constraint solving via Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and probabilistic inference via Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). We are also able to show that our runtime performance is more than competitive to current ILP solvers and the fastest available, probabilistic but non-temporal, database engines.

In this paper, we investigate a novel approach of computing confidence bounds for top-k ranking queries in probabilistic databases with non-materialized views. Unlike prior approaches, we present an exact pruning algorithm for finding the top-ranked query answers according to their marginal probabilities without the need to first materialize all answer candidates via the views. Specifically, we consider conjunctive queries over multiple levels of select-project-join views, the latter of which are cast into Datalog rules, where also the rules themselves may be uncertain, i.e., be valid with some degree of confidence. To our knowledge, this work is the first to address integrated data and confidence computations in the context of probabilistic databases by considering confidence bounds over partially evaluated query answers with first-order lineage formulas. We further extend our query processing techniques by a tool-suite of scheduling strategies based on selectivity estimation and the expected impact of subgoals on the final confidence of answer candidates. Experiments with large datasets demonstrate drastic runtime improvements over both sampling and decomposition-based methods-even in the presence of recursive rules.

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Abstract. We present a verification system for Creol, an object-oriented modeling language for concurrent distributed applications. The system is an instance of KeY, a framework for object-oriented software verification, which has so far been applied foremost to sequential Java. Building on KeY characteristic concepts, like dynamic logic, sequent calculus, explicit substitutions, and the taclet rule language, the system presented in this paper addresses functional correctness of Creol models featuring local cooperative thread parallelism and global communication via asynchronous method calls. The calculus heavily operates on communication histories which describe the interfaces of Creol units. Two example scenarios demonstrate the usage of the system.