Transactional and Incremental Type Inference from Data Updates

Abstract

A distinctive property of relational database systems is the ability to perform data updates and queries in atomic blocks called transactions, with the well-known atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) properties. To date, the ability of systems performing reasoning to maintain the ACID properties, even over data held within a relational database, has been largely ignored. This article studies an approach to reasoning over data from web ontology language (OWL) 2 RL ontologies held in a relational database, where the ACID properties of transactions are maintained. Taking an incremental approach to maintaining materialised views of the result of reasoning, the approach is demonstrated to support a query and reasoning performance comparable to or better than other OWL reasoning systems, yet adding the important benefit of supporting transactions.

Transactional and Incremental Type Inference from Data Updates

“… also defines the truth condition for A-Box facts asserted by A-Box statements such as Rules ( 10)- (16). For example,  satisfying the class fact John is a Man in Rule ( 16) can be written as…”

“…This article presents a substantially extended version of Ref. [16], and is organised as follows. In Section 2, we review the OWL and DRed, on which the contents of this article are based.…”

“…Section 4 extends Ref. [16] by providing a complete analysis of how all OWL 2 RL axioms are handled. Note that because we adopt a unique name assumption (UNA) this analysis excludes sameAs.…”

“…In Section 5, we give a more detailed discussion about our SQOWL2 implementation, and in Section 6, we provide an extended evaluation of our system compared to that in Ref. [16], in particular discussing how the database may be tuned to improve performance. Section 7 provides a brief summary of similar systems, and finally, Section 8 draws some conclusions from this work.…”