Semantic web/Web sémantique in areas (2024-02-10)

In this paper, we present a detailed and complete study on data interlinking and the discovery of identity links between two RDF-Resource Description Framework-datasets over the web of data. Data interlinking is the task of discovering identity links between individuals across datasets. Link keys are constructions based on pairs of properties and classes that can be considered as rules allowing to infer identity links between subjects in two RDF datasets. Here we investigate how FCA-Formal Concept Analysis-and its extensions are well adapted to investigate and to support the discovery of link keys. Indeed plain FCA allows to discover the so-called link key candidates, while a specific pattern structure allows to associate a pair of classes with every candidate. Different link key candidates can generate sets of identity links between individuals that can be considered as equal when they are regarded as partitions of the identity relation and thus involving a kind of redundancy. In this paper, such a redundancy is deeply studied thanks to partition pattern structures. In particular, experiments are proposed where it is shown that redundancy of link key candidates while not significant when based on identity of partitions appears to be much more significant when based on similarity.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the web that enables people to express knowledge in a way that machines can reason with it. At the web scale, this knowledge may be described using different ontologies, and alignments have been defined to express these differences. Furthermore, the same individual may be represented by different instances in different datasets. Dealing with knowledge heterogeneity in the Semantic Web requires comparing these knowledge structures. Our objective is to understand heterogeneity and benefit from this understanding, not to reduce diversity. In this context, we have studied and contributed to techniques and measures for comparing knowledge structures on the Semantic Web along three dimensions: ontologies, alignments, and instances. At the ontology level, we propose measures for the ontology space and alignment space. The first family of measures relies solely on the content of ontologies, while the second one takes advantage of alignments between ontologies. At the alignment level, we investigate how to assess the quality of alignments. First, we study how to extend classical controlled evaluation measures by considering the semantics of aligned ontologies while relaxing the all-or-nothing nature of logical entailment. We also propose estimating the quality of alignments when no reference alignment is available. At the instance level, we tackle the challenge of identifying resources from different knowledge graphs that represent the same entity. We follow an approach based on keys and alignments. Specifically, we propose the notion of a link key, algorithms for extracting them, and measures to assess their quality. Finally, we recast this work in the perspective of the dynamics and evolution of knowledge.

What makes a true lively society is the capability of their members to autonomously adapt to others. It is not a set of norms cast in iron, be they programming norms or ’legal norms’. It is a set of beings trying to behave with others. This behaviour may lead to explicit norms that make explicit what should not have/need to be reinvented, but they may well remain implicit, hence continuously adapted. We should design software agents so that they are able to elaborate what drives their (social but not only) behaviours. They should be allowed to try, to make mistakes, and to transmit what they know. This is the ground on which evolution may happen. This capacity is what should be built in agents in order for them to behave without breaking too many things. The goal is not to reach a static equilibrium: in an open-ended agent space there are always opportunities to learn new things, meet new people and visit new places. Hence, rather than the state reached by agents, this is they ability to surf a dynamic disequilibrium that must be sought. This statement is somewhat made for triggering reactions within the seminar. It reacts to the apparent loss of autonomy of agents. It also extend the one I did for the previous seminar.

Plusieurs méthodes ont été proposées pour aborder les tâches d’interconnexion de données et d’alignement d’ontologies, qui sont généralement traitées séparément. Dans cet article, nous présentons DICAP, un algorithme qui permet leur collaboration mutuelle. Les expériences réalisées montrent que l’ajout de relations owl:sameAs résultant de l’interconnexion de données permet de découvrir des correspondances ontologiques supplémentaires. De plus, la présence de correspondances ontologiques permet l’extraction de règles de liage supplémentaires et discriminantes.

Des agents peuvent faire évoluer leurs ontologies en accomplissant conjointement une tâche. Nous considérons un ensemble de tâches dont chaque agent ne considère qu'une partie. Nous supposons que moins un agent considère de tâches, plus la précision de sa meilleure tâche sera élevée. Pour le vérifier, nous simulons différentes populations considérant un nombre de tâches croissant. De manière contre-intuitive, l'hypothèse n'est pas vérifiée. D'une part, lorsque les agents ont une mémoire illimitée, plus un agent considère de tâches, plus il est précis. D'autre part, lorsque les agents ont une mémoire limitée, les objectifs de maximiser la précision de leur meilleures tâches et de s'accorder entre eux sont mutuellement exclusifs. Lorsque les sociétés favorisent la spécialisation, les agents n'améliorent pas leur précision. Cependant, ces agents décideront plus souvent en fonction de leurs meilleures tâches, améliorant ainsi la performance de leur société.

Cultural values are cognitive representations of general objectives, such as independence or mastery, that people use to distinguish whether something is "good" or "bad". More specifically, people may use their values to evaluate alternatives and pick the most compatible one. Cultural values have been previously used in artificial societies of agents with the purpose of replicating and predicting human behavior. However, to the best of our knowledge, they have never been used in the context of cultural knowledge evolution. We consider cooperating agents which adapt their individually learned ontologies by interacting with each other to agree. When two agents disagree during an interaction, one of them needs to adapt its ontology. We use the cultural values of independence, novelty, authority and mastery to influence the choice of which agent adapts in a population of agents sharing the same values. We investigate the effects the choice of cultural values has on the knowledge obtained. Our results show that agents do not improve the accuracy of their knowledge without using the mastery value. Under certain conditions, independence causes the agents to converge to successful interactions faster, and novelty increases knowledge diversity, but both effects come with a large reduction in accuracy. We however did not find any significant effects of authority.

A link key between two RDF datasets D1 and D2 is a set of pairs of properties allowing to identify pairs of individuals 𝑥1 and 𝑥2 through an identity link such as x1 owl∶sameAs x2. In this paper, relying on and extending previous work, we introduce an original formalization of link key discovery based on the framework of Partition Pattern Structures (pps). Our objective is to study and evaluate the redundancy of link keys based on the fact that owl:sameAs is an equivalence relation. In the pps concept lattice, every concept has an extent representing a link key candidate and an intent representing a partition of instances into sets of equivalent instances. Experiments show three main results. Firstly redundancy of link keys is not so significant in real-world datasets. Nevertheless, the link key discovery approach based on pps returns a reduced number of non redundant link key candidates when compared to a standard approach. Moreover, the pps-based approach is efficient and returns link keys of high quality.

A link key between two RDF datasets D1 and D2 is a set of pairs of properties allowing to identify pairs of individuals, say x1 in D1 and x2 in D2, which can be materialized as a x1 owl:sameAs x2 identity link. There exist several ways to mine such link keys but no one takes into account the fact that owl:sameAs is an equivalence relation, which leads to the discovery of non-redundant link keys. Accordingly, in this paper, we present the link key discovery based on Pattern Structures (PS). PS output a pattern concept lattice where every concept has an extent representing a set of pairs of individuals and an intent representing the related link key candidate. Then, we discuss the equivalence relation induced by a link key and we introduce the notion of non-redundant link key candidate.

Agents have been used for simulating cultural evolution and cultural evolution can be used as a model for artificial agents. Previous results have shown that horizontal, or intra-generation, knowledge transmission allows agents to improve the quality of their knowledge to a certain level. Moreover, variation generated through vertical, or inter-generation, transmission allows agents to exceed that level. Such results were obtained under specific conditions such as the drastic selection of agents allowed to transmit their knowledge, seeding the process with correct knowledge or introducing artificial noise during transmission. Here, we question the necessity of such measures and study their impact on the quality of transmitted knowledge. For that purpose, we combine the settings of two previous experiments and relax these conditions (no strong selection of teachers, no fully correct seed, no introduction of artificial noise). The rationale is that if interactions lead agents to improve their overall knowledge quality, this should be sufficient to ensure correct knowledge transmission, and that transmission mechanisms are sufficiently imperfect to produce variation. In this setting, we confirm that vertical transmission improves on horizontal transmission even without drastic selection and oriented learning. We also show that horizontal transmission is able to compensate for the lack of parent selection if it is maintained for long enough. This means that it is not necessary to take the most successful agents as teachers, neither in vertical nor horizontal transmission, to cumulatively improve knowledge.

The content of experiments must be semantically described. This topic has already been largely covered. However, some neglected benefits of such an approach provide more arguments in favour of scientific knowledge graphs. Beyond being searchable through flat metadata, a knowledge graph of experiment descriptions may be able to provide answers to scientific and methodological questions. This includes identifying non experimented conditions or retrieving specific techniques used in experiments. In turn, this is useful for researchers as this information can be used for repurposing experiments, checking claimed results or performing meta-analyses.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are unceasingly used by different organisation to represent real- world entities in the form of a graph. They may use an ontological layer for describing the classes and properties of the represented entities. RDF knowledge graphs are knowledge graphs that convey to the RDF model. RDF knowledge graph interlinking is the task of identifying different IRIs belonging to different RDF knowledge graphs and referring to the same real- world entity. This facilitates data integration and interoperability by combining different entity descriptions present in different knowledge graphs.There exist different methods for addressing the task of interlinking RDF knowledge graph. Link keys are among these methods. They are used for interlinking RDF knowledge graphs described using different ontologies. Link keys specify the properties to be compared to decide whether two entities belonging to different classes and present in different knowledge graphs are the same.Link keys can be expressed as logical axioms, and, thus, it is possible to combine them with ontologies, and ontology alignments to perform logical reasoning. In this thesis, we aim to study the problem of reasoning with link keys. To formally investigate this problem, we model RDF knowledge graphs, ontologies, and ontology alignments using the description logic ALC. We choose the description logic ALC as a base language for reasoning. ALC covers many modeling capabilities used for knowledge representation and allows for a more easy extension to more expressive description logics. We extend ALC with link keys and individual equalities, the resulting description logic is called ALC+LK. We show that link key entailment can be reduced to link key consistency checking without the need of introducing the negation of link keys.Then we design an algorithm for deciding the consistency of ALC+LK ontology. We have proved that the algorithm is sound, complete, and always terminates. This algorithm runs in 2EXPTIME. However, there exist EXPTIME algorithms for reasoning in ALC and the completion rules added for handling link keys and equalities require no more computational power than that of ALC.In the light of the above, we design a sound, complete, worst-case optimal algorithm for reasoning in ALC+LK. This algorithm is inspired by the compressed tableau algorithm, which allows obtaining the EXPTIME optimal complexity result. However, this algorithm has a non- directed behaviour which obstruct its implementation.Last but most importantly, we propose a sound, complete, and worst-case optimal tableau algorithm for reasoning in the description logic ALC with individuals and link keys. This al- gorithm, in contrast to the non-directed one, is directed by the application of completion rules. This avoids the generation of useless structures and facilitates its implementation. We implement this algorithm and provide a number of proof-of-concept experiments that demonstrates the importance of reasoning with link keys for the data interlinking task.

A link key between two RDF datasets D1 and D2 is a set ofpairs of properties allowing to identify pairs of individuals, say x1 in D1 and x2 in D2, which can be materialized as ax1owl:sameAs x2 identity link. There exist several ways to mine such link keys but no one takes into account the fact that owl:sameAs is an equivalence relation, which leads to the discovery of non-redundant link keys. Accordingly, in this paper, we present the link key discovery based on Pattern Structures (PS). PS output a pattern concept lattice where every concept has an extent representing a set of pairs of individuals and an intent representing the related link key candidate. Then, we discuss the equivalence relation induced by a link key and we introduce the notion of non-redundant link key candidate.

Both keys and their generalisation, link keys, may be used to perform data interlinking, i.e. finding identical resources in different RDF datasets. However, the precise relationship between keys and link keys has not been fully determined yet. A common formal framework encompassing both keys and link keys is necessary to ensure the correctness of data interlinking tools based on them, and to determine their scope and possible overlapping. In this paper, we provide a semantics for keys and link keys within description logics. We determine under which conditions they are legitimate to generate links. We provide conditions under which link keys are logically equivalent to keys. In particular, we show that data interlinking with keys and ontology alignments can be reduced to data interlinking with link keys, but not the other way around.

A link key extraction procedure in case of circular dependencies is presented. It uses relational concept analysis and extends the procedure of Deliverable 1.1. This leads to investigate more closely the semantics of relational concept analysis which is given in terms of fixed points. Extracting all fixed points may offer more link key candidates to consider.

When agents independently learn knowledge, such as ontologies, about their environment, it may be diverse, incorrect or incomplete. This knowledge heterogeneity could lead agents to disagree, thus hindering their cooperation. Existing approaches usually deal with this interaction problem by relating ontologies, without modifying them, or, on the contrary, by focusing on building common knowledge. Here, we consider agents adapting ontologies learned from the environment in order to agree with each other when cooperating. In this scenario, fundamental questions arise: Do they achieve successful interaction? Can this process improve knowledge correctness? Do all agents end up with the same ontology? To answer these questions, we design a two-stage experiment. First, agents learn to take decisions about the environment by classifying objects and the learned classifiers are turned into ontologies. In the second stage, agents interact with each other to agree on the decisions to take and modify their ontologies accordingly. We show that agents indeed reduce interaction failure, most of the time they improve the accuracy of their knowledge about the environment, and they do not necessarily opt for the same ontology.

Ontology alignments enable agents to communicate while preserving heterogeneity in their knowledge. Alignments may not be provided as input and should be able to evolve when communication fails or when new information contradicting the alignment is acquired. The Alignment Repair Game (ARG) has been proposed for agents to simultaneously communicate and repair their alignments through adaptation operators when communication failures occur. ARG has been evaluated experimentally and the experiments showed that agents converge towards successful communication and improve their alignments. However, whether the adaptation operators are formally correct, complete or redundant could not be established by experiments. We introduce a logical model, Dynamic Epistemic Ontology Logic (DEOL), that enables us to answer these questions. This framework allows us (1) to express the ontologies and alignments used via a faithful translation from ARG to DEOL, (2) to model the ARG adaptation operators as dynamic modalities and (3) to formally define and establish the correctness, partial redundancy and incompleteness of the adaptation operators in ARG.

In this paper, we are interested in the discovery of link keys among two different RDF datasets based on FCA and pattern structures. A link key identifies individuals which represent the same real world entity. Two main strategies are used to automatically discover link keys, ignoring or not the classes to which the individuals belong to. Indeed, a link key may be relevant for some pair of classes and not relevant for another. Then, discovering link keys for one pair of classes at a time may be computationally expensive if every pair should be considered. To overcome such limitations, we introduce a specific and original pattern structure where link keys can be discovered in one pass while specifying the pair of classes associated with each link key, focusing on the discovery process and allowing more flexibility.

Ontology matching and data interlinking as distinguished tasks aim at facilitating the interoperability between different knowledge bases. Although the field has fully developed in the last years, most works still focus on generating simple correspondences between entities. These correspondences are however insufficient to fully cover the different types of heterogeneity between the knowledge base and complex correspondences are therefore required. Compared to simple matching, few approaches for complex matching have been proposed, focusing on correspondence patterns or exploiting common instances between the ontologies. Similarly, unsupervised data interlinking approaches (which do not require labelled data samples) have recently been developed. One approach consists in discovering linking rules such as simple keys or conditional keys on unlabelled data. The results have shown that the more expressive the rules, the higher the recall. Even more expressive rules (referential expressions, graph keys, etc.) are rather required, however naive approaches to the discovery of these rules can not be envisaged on large data sets. Existing approaches presuppose either that the data conform to the same ontology or that all possible pairs of properties be examined. Complementary, link keys are a set of pairs of properties that identify the instances of two classes of two RDF datasets. Such, link keys may be directly extracted without the need for an alignment. We introduce here an approach that aims at evaluating the impact of complex correspondences in the task of data interlinking established from the application of keys.

Linked data aims at publishing data expressed in RDF (Resource Description Framework) at the scale of the worldwide web. These datasets interoperate by publishing links which identify individuals across heterogeneous datasets. Such links may be found by using a generalisation of keys in databases, called link keys, which apply across datasets. They specify the pairs of properties to compare for linking individuals belonging to different classes of the datasets. Here, we show how to recast the proposed link key extraction techniques for RDF datasets in the framework of formal concept analysis. We define a formal context, where objects are pairs of resources and attributes are pairs of properties, and show that formal concepts correspond to link key candidates. We extend this characterisation to the full RDF model including non functional properties and interdependent link keys. We show how to use relational concept analysis for dealing with cyclic dependencies across classes and hence link keys. Finally, we discuss an implementation of this framework.

The current state of the semantic web is focused on data. This is a worthwhile progress in web content processing and interoperability. However, this does only marginally contribute to knowledge improvement and evolution. Understanding the world, and interpreting data, requires knowledge. Not knowledge cast in stone for ever, but knowledge that can seamlessly evolve; not knowledge from one single authority, but diverse knowledge sources which stimulate confrontation and robustness; not consistent knowledge at web scale, but local theories that can be combined. We discuss two different ways in which semantic web technologies can greatly contribute to the advancement of knowledge: semantic eScience and cultural knowledge evolution.

The semantic web aims at making web content interpretable. It is no less than offering knowledge representation at web scale. The main ingredients used in this context are the representation of assertional knowledge through graphs, the definition of the vocabularies used in graphs through ontologies, and the connection of these representations through the web. Artificial intelligence techniques and, more specifically, knowledge representation techniques, are put to use and to the test by the semantic web. Indeed, they have to face typical problems of the web: scale, heterogeneity, incompleteness, and dynamics. This chapter provides a short presentation of the state of the semantic web and refers to other chapters concerning those techniques at work in the semantic web.

Ontology matching aims at discovering mappings between the entities of two ontologies. It plays an important role in the integration of heterogeneous data sources that are described by ontologies. Interactive ontology matching involves domain experts in the matching process. In some approaches, the expert provides feedback about mappings between ontology entities, i.e., these approaches select mappings to present to the expert who replies which of them should be accepted or rejected, so taking advantage of the knowledge of domain experts towards finding an alignment. In this paper, we present Alin, an interactive ontology matching approach which uses expert feedback not only to approve or reject selected mappings, but also to dynamically improve the set of selected mappings, i.e., to interactively include and to exclude mappings from it. This additional use for expert answers aims at increasing in the benefit brought by each expert answer. For this purpose, Alin uses four techniques. Two techniques were used in previous versions of Alin to dynamically select concept and attribute mappings. Two new techniques are introduced in this paper: one to dynamically select relationship mappings and another one to dynamically reject inconsistent selected mappings using anti-patterns. We compared Alin with state-of-the-art tools, showing that it generates alignment of comparable quality.

Ontology alignments enable agents to communicate while preserving heterogeneity in their information. Alignments may not be provided as input and should be able to evolve when communication fails or when new information contradicting the alignment is acquired. In the Alignment Repair Game (ARG) this evolution is achieved via adaptation operators. ARG was evaluated experimentally and the experiments showed that agents converge towards successful communication and improve their alignments. However, whether the adaptation operators are formally correct, complete or redundant is still an open question. In this paper, we introduce a formal framework based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic that allows us to answer this question. This framework allows us (1) to express the ontologies and alignments used, (2) to model the ARG adaptation operators through announcements and conservative upgrades and (3) to formally establish the correctness, partial redundancy and incompleteness of the adaptation operators in ARG.

Links constitute the core of Linked Data philosophy. With the high growth of data published in the web, many frameworks have been proposed to deal with the link discovery problem, and particularly the identity links. Finding such kinds of links between different RDF data sets is a critical task. In this position paper, we focus on link key which consists of sets of pairs of properties identifying the same entities across heterogeneous datasets. We also propose to formalize the problem of link key discovery using Pattern Structures (PS), the generalization of Formal Concept Analysis dealing with non binary datasets. After providing the proper definitions of link keys and setting the problem in terms of PS, we show that the intents of the pattern concepts correspond to link keys and their extents to sets of identity links generated by their intents. Finally, we discuss an implementation of this framework and we show the applicability and the scalability of the proposed method.

Data interlinking is an important task for linked data interoperability. One of the possible techniques for finding links is the use of link keys which generalise relational keys to pairs of RDF models. We show how link key candidates may be directly extracted from RDF data sets by encoding the extraction problem in relational concept analysis. This method deals with non functional properties and circular dependent link key expressions. As such, it generalises those presented for non dependent link keys and link keys over the relational model. The proposed method is able to return link key candidates involving several classes at once.

Link keys express conditions under which instances of two classes of different RDF data sets may be considered as equal. As such, they can be used for data interlinking. There exist algorithms to extract link key candidates from RDF data sets and different measures have been defined to evaluate the quality of link key candidates individually. For certain data sets, however, it may be necessary to use more than one link key on a pair of classes to retrieve a more complete set of links. To this end, in this paper, we define disjunction of link keys, propose strategies to extract disjunctions of link key candidates from RDF data, and apply existing quality measures to evaluate them. We also report on experiments with these strategies.

Data interlinking is a critical task for widening and enhancing linked open data. One way to tackle data interlinking is to use link keys, which generalise keys to the case of two RDF datasets described using different ontologies. Link keys specify pairs of properties to compare for finding same-as links between instances of two classes of two different datasets. Hence, they can be used for finding links. Link keys can also be considered as logical axioms just like keys, ontologies and ontology alignments. We introduce the logic ALC+LK extending the description logic ALC with link keys. It may be used to reason and infer entailed link keys that may be more useful for a particular data interlinking task. We show that link key entailment can be reduced to consistency checking without introducing the negation of link keys. For deciding the consistency of an ALC+LK ontology, we introduce a new tableau-based algorithm. Contrary to the classical ones, the completion rules concerning link keys apply to pairs of individuals not directly related. We show that this algorithm is sound, complete and always terminates.

A link key extraction procedure using formal concept analysis is described. It is shown to extract all link key candidates.

Ontology alignments enable interoperability between heterogeneous information resources. The Alignment Repair Game (ARG) specifically provides a way for agents to simultaneously communicate and improve the alignment when a communication failure occurs. This is achieved through applying adaptation operators that provide a revision strategy for agents to resolve failures with minimum information loss. In this paper, we explore how closely these operators resemble logical dynamics. We develop a variant of Dynamic Epistemic Logic called DEOL to capture the dynamics of ARG by modeling ontologies as knowledge and alignments as belief with respect to the plausibility relation. The dynamics of ARG are then achieved through announcements and conservative upgrades. With the representation of ARG in DEOL, we formally establish the limitations and the redundancy of the adaptation operators. More precisely, that for a complete logical reasoner, replace, addjoin and refine are redundant for one or both agents in the game and that add would be replaced by addjoin in all cases.

Query transformations are ubiquitous in semantic web query processing. For any situation in which transformations are not proved correct by construction, the quality of these transformations has to be evaluated. Usual evaluation measures are either overly syntactic and not very informative ---the result being: correct or incorrect--- or dependent from the evaluation sources. Moreover, both approaches do not necessarily yield the same result. We suggest that grounding the evaluation on query containment allows for a data-independent evaluation that is more informative than the usual syntactic evaluation. In addition, such evaluation modalities may take into account ontologies, alignments or different query languages as soon as they are relevant to query evaluation.

The built environment consists of plenty of physical assets with which we interact on a daily basis. In order to improve not only our built environment, but also our interaction with that environment, we would benefit a lot from semantic representations of this environment. This not only includes buildings, but also large infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, waterways, underground systems), and geospatial data. With this special issue, an insight is given into the current state of the art in terms of semantic technologies and interoperability in this built environment. This editorial not only summarizes the content of the Special Issue on Semantic Technologies and interoperability in the Built Environment, it also provides a brief overview of the current state of the art in general in terms of standardisation and community efforts.

Interactive Ontology Matching considers the participation of domain experts during the matching process of two ontologies. An important step of this process is the selection of mappings to submit to the expert. These mappings can be between concepts, attributes or relationships of the ontologies. Existing approaches define the set of mapping suggestions only in the beginning of the process before expert involvement. In previous work, we proposed an approach to refine the set of mapping suggestions after each expert feedback, benefiting from the expert feedback to form a set of mapping suggestions of better quality. In this approach, only concept mappings were considered during the refinement. In this paper, we show a new approach to evaluate the benefit of also considering attribute mappings during the interactive phase of the process. The approach was evaluated using the OAEI conference data set, which showed an increase in recall without sacrificing precision. The approach was compared with the state-of-the-art, showing that the approach has generated alignment with state-of-the-art quality.

Query containment is defined as the problem of determining if the result of a query is included in the result of another query for any dataset. It has major applications in query optimization and knowledge base verification. The main objective of this work is to provide sound and complete procedures to determine containment of SPARQL queries under expressive description logic schema axioms. Beyond that, these procedures are experimentally evaluated. To date, testing query containment has been performed using different techniques: containment mapping, canonical databases, automata theory techniques and through a reduction to the validity problem in logic. In this work, we use the latter technique to test containment of SPARQL queries using an expressive modal logic called mu-calculus. For that purpose, we define an RDF graph encoding as a transition system which preserves its characteristics. In addition, queries and schema axioms are encoded as mu-calculus formulae. Thereby, query containment can be reduced to testing validity in the logic. We identify various fragments of SPARQL and description logic schema languages for which containment is decidable. Additionally, we provide theoretically and experimentally proven procedures to check containment of these decidable fragments. Finally, we propose a benchmark for containment solvers which is used to test and compare the current state-of-the-art containment solvers.

Experimental cultural evolution has been convincingly applied to the evolution of natural language and we aim at applying it to knowledge. Indeed, knowledge can be thought of as a shared artefact among a population influenced through communication with others. It can be seen as resulting from contradictory forces: internal consistency, i.e., pressure exerted by logical constraints, against environmental and social pressure, i.e., the pressure exerted by the world and the society agents live in. However, adapting to environmental and social pressure may lead agents to adopt the same knowledge. From an ecological perspective, this is not particularly appealing: species can resist changes in their environment because of the diversity of the solutions that they can offer. This problem may be approached by involving diversity as an internal constraint resisting external pressure towards uniformity.

Linked Data provides access to huge, continuously growing amounts of open data and ontologies in RDF format that describe entities, links and properties on those entities. Equipping Linked Data with inference paves the way to make the Semantic Web a reality. In this survey, we describe a unifying framework for RDF ontologies and databases that we call deductive RDF triplestores. It consists in equipping RDF triplestores with Datalog inference rules. This rule language allows to capture in a uniform manner OWL constraints that are useful in practice, such as property transitivity or symmetry, but also domain-specific rules with practical relevance for users in many domains of interest. The expressivity and the genericity of this framework is illustrated for modeling Linked Data applications and for developing inference algorithms. In particular, we show how it allows to model the problem of data linkage in Linked Data as a reasoning problem on possibly decentralized data. We also explain how it makes possible to efficiently extract expressive modules from Semantic Web ontologies and databases with formal guarantees, whilst effectively controlling their succinctness. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and its usefulness in practice for data integration and information extraction.

Ontology Matching is the task of finding a set of entity correspondences between a pair of ontologies, i.e. an alignment. It has been receiving a lot of attention due to its broad applications. Many techniques have been proposed, among which the ones applying interactive strategies. An interactive ontology matching strategy uses expert knowledge towards improving the quality of the final alignment. When these strategies are based on the expert feedback to validate correspondences, it is important to establish criteria for selecting the set of correspondences to be shown to the expert. A bad definition of this set can prevent the algorithm from finding the right alignment or it can delay convergence. In this work we present techniques which, when used simultaneously, improve the set of candidate correspondences. These techniques are incorporated in an interactive ontology matching approach, called ALINSyn. Experiments successfully show the potential of our proposal.

Vast amounts of RDF data are made available on the web by various institutions providing overlapping information. To be fully exploited, different representations of the same object across various data sets have to be identified. This is what is called data interlinking. One novel way to generate such links is to use link keys. Link keys generalise database keys by applying them across two data sets. The structure of RDF makes this problem much more complex than for relational databases for several reasons. An instance can have multiple values for a given attribute. Moreover, values of properties are not necessarily datatypes but instances of the graph. A first method has been designed to extract and select link keys from two classes of objects which deals with multiple values but not object values. Moreover, the extraction step has been rephrased in formal concept analysis (FCA) allowing to generate link keys across relational tables. Our aim is to extend this work so that it can deal with multiple values. Then, we show how to use it to deal with object values when the data set is cycle free. This encoding does not necessarily generate the optimal link keys. Hence, we use relational concept analysis (RCA), an extension of FCA taking relations between concepts into account. We show that a new expression of this problem is able to extract the optimal link keys even in the presence of circularities. Moreover, the elaborated process does not require information about the alignments of the ontologies to find out for which pairs of classes to extract link keys. We implemented these methods and evaluated them by reproducing the experiments made in previous studies. This shows that the method extracts the expected results as well as (also expected) scalability issues.