[2310.16472] Semiring Provenance for Lightweight Description Logics

Computer Science > Logic in Computer Science arXiv:2310.16472 (cs) [Submitted on 25 Oct 2023 (v1), last revised 30 Mar 2026 (this version, v4)] Title:Semiring Provenance for Lightweight Description Logics Authors:Camille Bourgaux, Ana Ozaki, Rafael Peñaloza View a PDF of the paper titled Semiring Provenance for Lightweight Description Logics, by Camille Bourgaux and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:We investigate semiring provenance--a successful framework originally defined in the relational database setting--for description logics. In this context, the ontology axioms are annotated with elements of a commutative semiring and these annotations are propagated to the ontology consequences in a way that reflects how they are derived. We define a provenance semantics for a language that encompasses several lightweight description logics and show its relationships with semantics that have been defined for ontologies annotated with a specific kind of annotation (such as fuzzy degrees). We show that under some restrictions on the semiring, the semantics satisfies desirable properties (such as extending the semiring provenance defined for databases). We then focus on the well-known why-provenance, for which we study the complexity of problems related to the provenance of an assertion or a conjunctive query answer. Finally, we consider two more restricted cases which correspond to the so-called positive Boolean provenance and lineage in the database setting. F...