Evolution of OWL 2 QL Knowledge Bases: From Inexpressibility to Practical Approaches

Knowledge bases (KBs) are not static entities: new information constantly appears and some of the previous knowledge becomes obsolete. In order to reflect this evolution of knowledge, KBs should be expanded with the new knowledge and contracted from the obsolete one. This problem is well-studied for propositional but much less for first-order KBs. In this work we investigate knowledge expansion and contraction for KBs expressed in OWL 2 QL, a tractable fragment of the Web Ontology Language OWL 2. We start with a novel knowledge evolution framework and natural postulates that evolution should respect, and compare our postulates to the well-established AGM postulates. We then review well-known model and formula-based approaches for expansion and contraction for propositional theories and show how they can be adapted to the case of OWL 2 QL. In particular we show inexpressibility challenges for the former and practical algorithms for the latter approaches.