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Negative Knowledge for Certain Query Answers

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Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9898))

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Abstract

Querying incomplete data usually amounts to finding answers we are certain about. Standard approaches concentrate on positive information about query answers, and miss negative knowledge, which can be useful for two reasons. First, sometimes it is the only type of knowledge one can infer with certainty, and second, it may help one find good and efficient approximations of positive certain answers. Our goal is to consider a framework for defining both positive and negative certain knowledge about query answers and to show two applications of it. First, we demonstrate that it naturally leads to a way of representing certain information that has hitherto not been used in querying incomplete databases. Second, we show that approximations of such certain information can be computed efficiently for all first-order queries over relational databases.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to anonymous referees for their comments. This work was partly supported by EPSRC grants J015377 and M025268.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Leonid Libkin

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  1. Leonid Libkin
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Correspondence to Leonid Libkin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology , Vienna, Austria

    Magdalena Ortiz

  2. Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

    Stefan Schlobach

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Libkin, L. (2016). Negative Knowledge for Certain Query Answers. In: Ortiz, M., Schlobach, S. (eds) Web Reasoning and Rule Systems. RR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9898. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45276-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45276-0_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45275-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45276-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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