Using Description Logics for RDF Constraint Checking and Closed-World Recognition
This work addresses a specific issue in semantic web technologies for researchers and practitioners dealing with RDF data, but it appears incremental as it adapts existing Description Logic methods to a closed-world interpretation.
The paper tackles the problem of performing constraint checking and closed-world recognition in RDF and Description Logics, which typically operate in an open-world setting, by interpreting axioms in a closed-world setting and implementing this as SPARQL querying for effective execution.
RDF and Description Logics work in an open-world setting where absence of information is not information about absence. Nevertheless, Description Logic axioms can be interpreted in a closed-world setting and in this setting they can be used for both constraint checking and closed-world recognition against information sources. When the information sources are expressed in well-behaved RDF or RDFS (i.e., RDF graphs interpreted in the RDF or RDFS semantics) this constraint checking and closed-world recognition is simple to describe. Further this constraint checking can be implemented as SPARQL querying and thus effectively performed.