Operational consistent query answering (CQA) is a recent framework for CQA based on revised definitions of repairs, which are built by applying a sequence of operations (e.g., fact deletions) starting from an inconsistent database until we reach a database that is consistent w.r.t. the given set of constraints. It has been recently shown that there are efficient approximations for computing the percentage of repairs, as well as of sequences of operations leading to repairs, that entail a given query when we focus on primary keys, conjunctive queries, and assuming the query is fixed (i.e., in data complexity). However, it has been left open whether such approximations exist when the query is part of the input (i.e., in combined complexity). We show that this is the case when we focus on self-join-free conjunctive queries of bounded generelized hypertreewidth. We also show that it is unlikely that efficient approximation schemes exist once we give up one of the adopted syntactic restrictions, i.e., self-join-freeness or bounding the generelized hypertreewidth. Towards the desired approximation schemes, we introduce a novel counting complexity class, called SpanTL, show that each problem in SpanTL admits an efficient approximation scheme by using a recent approximability result in the context of tree automata, and then place the problems of interest in SpanTL.
We study consistent query answering in relational databases. We consider an expressive class of schema constraints that generalizes both tuple-generating dependencies and equality-generating dependencies. We establish the complexity of consistent query answering and repair checking under tuple-deletion semantics for different fragments of the above constraint language. In particular, we identify new subclasses of constraints in which the above problems are tractable or even first-order rewritable.
Consistent query answering is an inconsistency tolerant approach to obtaining semantically correct answers from a database that may be inconsistent with respect to its integrity constraints. In this work we formalize the notion of consistent query answer for spatial databases and spatial semantic integrity constraints. In order to do this, we first characterize conflicting spatial data, and next, we define admissible instances that restore consistency while staying close to the original instance. In this way we obtain a repair semantics, which is used as an instrumental concept to define and p…
Differential privacy is a rigorous privacy condition achieved by randomizing query answers. This paper develops efficient algorithms for answering multiple queries under differential privacy with low error. We pursue this goal by advancing a recent approach called the matrix mechanism, which generalizes standard differentially private mechanisms. This new mechanism works by first answering a different set of queries (a strategy) and then inferring the answers to the desired workload of queries. Although a few strategies are known to work well on specific workloads, finding the strategy which m…
A consistent query answer in an inconsistent database is an answer obtained in every (minimal) repair. The repairs are obtained by resolving all conflicts in all possible ways. Often, however, the user is able to provide a preference on how conflicts should be resolved. We investigate here the framework of preferred consistent query answers, in which user preferences are used to narrow down the set of repairs to a set of preferred repairs. We axiomatize desirable properties of preferred repairs. We present three different families of preferred repairs and study their mutual relationships. Fina…
Most data analytical pipelines often encounter the problem of querying inconsistent data that violate pre-determined integrity constraints. Data cleaning is an extensively studied paradigm that singles out a consistent repair of the inconsistent data. Consistent query answering (CQA) is an alternative approach to data cleaning that asks for all tuples guaranteed to be returned by a given query on all (in most cases, exponentially many) repairs of the inconsistent data. This paper identifies a class of acyclic select-project-join (SPJ) queries for which CQA can be solved via SQL rewriting with …
We study the problem of consistent query answering under primary key violations. In this setting, the relations in a database violate the key constraints and we are interested in maximal subsets of the database that satisfy the constraints, which we call repairs. For a boolean query Q, the problem CERTAINTY(Q) asks whether every such repair satisfies the query or not; the problem is known to be always in coNP for conjunctive queries. However, there are queries for which it can be solved in polynomial time. It has been conjectured that there exists a dichotomy on the complexity of CERTAINTY(Q) …
Operational consistent query answering (CQA) is a recent framework for CQA, based on revised definitions of repairs and consistent answers, which opens up the possibility of efficient approximations with explicit error guarantees. The main idea is to iteratively apply operations (e.g., fact deletions), starting from an inconsistent database, until we reach a database that is consistent w.r.t. the given set of constraints. This gives us the flexibility of choosing the probability with which we apply an operation, which in turn allows us to calculate the probability of an operational repair, and…
The notion of actual causation, as formalized by Halpern and Pearl, has been recently applied to relational databases, to characterize and compute actual causes for possibly unexpected answers to monotone queries. Causes take the form of database tuples, and can be ranked according to their causal responsibility, a numerical measure of their relevance as a cause to the query answer. In this work we revisit this notion, introducing and making a case for an alternative measure of causal contribution, that of causal effect. The measure generalizes actual causes, and can be applied beyond monotone…
Matching dependencies were recently introduced as declarative rules for data cleaning and entity resolution. Enforcing a matching dependency on a database instance identifies the values of some attributes for two tuples, provided that the values of some other attributes are sufficiently similar. Assuming the existence of matching functions for making two attributes values equal, we formally introduce the process of cleaning an instance using matching dependencies, as a chase-like procedure. We show that matching functions naturally introduce a lattice structure on attribute domains, and a part…
Matching Dependencies (MDs) are a relatively recent proposal for declarative entity resolution. They are rules that specify, given the similarities satisfied by values in a database, what values should be considered duplicates, and have to be matched. On the basis of a chase-like procedure for MD enforcement, we can obtain clean (duplicate-free) instances; actually possibly several of them. The resolved answers to queries are those that are invariant under the resulting class of resolved instances. In previous work we identified some tractable cases (i.e. for certain classes of queries and MDs…
Range aggregate queries (RAQs) are an integral part of many real-world applications, where, often, fast and approximate answers for the queries are desired. Recent work has studied answering RAQs using machine learning models, where a model of the data is learned to answer the queries. However, such modelling choices fail to utilize any query specific information. To capture such information, we observe that RAQs can be represented by query functions, which are functions that take a query instance (i.e., a specific RAQ) as an input and output its corresponding answer. Using this representation…
We propose a novel mechanism for answering sets of count- ing queries under differential privacy. Given a workload of counting queries, the mechanism automatically selects a different set of "strategy" queries to answer privately, using those answers to derive answers to the workload. The main algorithm proposed in this paper approximates the optimal strategy for any workload of linear counting queries. With no cost to the privacy guarantee, the mechanism improves significantly on prior approaches and achieves near-optimal error for many workloads, when applied under (ε, δ)-differential privac…
With the recent proliferation of sensor data, there is an increasing need for the efficient evaluation of analytical queries over multiple sensor datasets. The magnitude of such datasets makes exact query answering infeasible, leading researchers into the development of approximate query answering approaches. However, existing approximate query answering algorithms are not suited for the efficient processing of queries over sensor data, as they exhibit at least one of the following shortcomings: (a) They do not provide deterministic error guarantees, resorting to weaker probabilistic error gua…
The Shapley value is a game-theoretic notion for wealth distribution that is nowadays extensively used to explain complex data-intensive computation, for instance, in network analysis or machine learning. Recent theoretical works show that query evaluation over relational databases fits well in this explanation paradigm. Yet, these works fall short of providing practical solutions to the computational challenge inherent to the Shapley computation. We present in this paper two practically effective solutions for computing Shapley values in query answering. We start by establishing a tight theor…
Query containment and query answering are two important computational tasks in databases. While query answering amounts to compute the result of a query over a database, query containment is the problem of checking whether for every database, the result of one query is a subset of the result of another query. In this paper, we deal with unions of conjunctive queries, and we address query containment and query answering under Description Logic constraints. Every such constraint is essentially an inclusion dependencies between concepts and relations, and their expressive power is due to the poss…
Classical algorithms for query optimization presuppose the absence of inconsistencies or uncertainties in the database and exploit only valid semantic knowledge provided, e.g., by integrity constraints. Data inconsistency or uncertainty, however, is a widespread critical issue in ordinary databases: total integrity is often, in fact, an unrealistic assumption and violations to integrity constraints may be introduced in several ways. In this report we present an approach for semantic query optimization that, differently from the traditional ones, relies on not necessarily valid semantic knowled…
We develop a query answering system, where at the core of the work there is an idea of query answering by rewriting. For this purpose we extend the DL DL-Lite with the ability to support n-ary relations, obtaining the DL DLR-Lite, which is still polynomial in the size of the data. We devise a flexible way of mapping the conceptual level to the relational level, which provides the users an SQL-like query language over the conceptual schema. The rewriting technique adds value to conventional query answering techniques, allowing to formulate simpler queries, with the ability to infer additional i…
In this paper, we study consistent query answering in tables with nulls and functional dependencies. Given such a table T, we consider the set Tuples of all tuples that can be built up from constants appearing in T, and we use set theoretic semantics for tuples and functional dependencies to characterize the tuples of Tuples in two orthogonal ways: first as true or false tuples, and then as consistent or inconsistent tuples. Queries are issued against T and evaluated in Tuples. In this setting, we consider a query Q: select X from T where Condition over T and define its consistent answer to be…
An inconsistent database is a database that violates one or more integrity constraints, such as functional dependencies. Consistent Query Answering is a rigorous and principled approach to the semantics of queries posed against inconsistent databases. The consistent answers to a query on an inconsistent database is the intersection of the answers to the query on every repair, i.e., on every consistent database that differs from the given inconsistent one in a minimal way. Computing the consistent answers of a fixed conjunctive query on a given inconsistent database can be a coNP-hard problem, …
In this paper, we formulate a top-k query that compares objects in a database to a user-provided query object on a novel scoring function. The proposed scoring function combines the idea of attractive and repulsive dimensions into a general framework to overcome the weakness of traditional distance or similarity measures. We study the properties of the proposed class of scoring functions and develop efficient and scalable index structures that index the isolines of the function. We demonstrate various scenarios where the query finds application. Empirical evaluation demonstrates a performance …
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博尔扎诺自由大学）
In Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) users pose SPARQL queries over an ontology that lies on top of relational datasources. These queries are translated on-the-fly into SQL queries by OBDA systems. Standard SPARQL-to-SQL translation techniques in OBDA often produce SQL queries containing redundant joins and unions, even after a number of semantic and structural optimizations. These redundancies are detrimental to the performance of query answering, especially in complex industrial OBDA scenarios with large enterprise databases. To address this issue, we introduce two novel notions of OBDA cons…
In this paper, we study the complexity of answering conjunctive queries (CQ) with inequalities). In particular, we are interested in comparing the complexity of the query with and without inequalities. The main contribution of our work is a novel combinatorial technique that enables us to use any Select-Project-Join query plan for a given CQ without inequalities in answering the CQ with inequalities, with an additional factor in running time that only depends on the query. The key idea is to define a new projection operator, which keeps a small representation (independent of the size of the da…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Università della Calabria（卡拉布里亚大学）
The use of preferences in query answering, both in traditional databases and in ontology-based data access, has recently received much attention, due to its many real-world applications. In this paper, we tackle the problem of top-k query answering in Datalog+/- ontologies subject to the querying user's preferences and a collection of (subjective) reports of other users. Here, each report consists of scores for a list of features, its author's preferences among the features, as well as other information. Theses pieces of information of every report are then combined, along with the querying us…
A relational database is said to be uncertain if primary key constraints can possibly be violated. A repair (or possible world) of an uncertain database is obtained by selecting a maximal number of tuples without ever selecting two distinct tuples with the same primary key value. For any Boolean query q, CERTAINTY(q) is the problem that takes an uncertain database db on input, and asks whether q is true in every repair of db. The complexity of this problem has been particularly studied for q ranging over the class of self-join-free Boolean conjunctive queries. A research challenge is to determ…
Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance（牛津-曼量化金融研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）
Datalog+/- is a family of ontology languages that combine good computational properties with high expressive power. Datalog+/- languages are provably able to capture the most relevant Semantic Web languages. In this paper we consider the class of weakly-sticky (WS) Datalog+/- programs, which allow for certain useful forms of joins in rule bodies as well as extending the well-known class of weakly-acyclic TGDs. So far, only non-deterministic algorithms were known for answering queries on WS Datalog+/- programs. We present novel deterministic query answering algorithms under WS Datalog+/-. In pa…
A relational database is inconsistent if it does not satisfy a given set of integrity constraints. Nevertheless, it is likely that most of the data in it is consistent with the constraints. In this paper we apply logic programming based on answer sets to the problem of retrieving consistent information from a possibly inconsistent database. Since consistent information persists from the original database to every of its minimal repairs, the approach is based on a specification of database repairs using disjunctive logic programs with exceptions, whose answer set semantics can be represented an…
SPARQL is the standard query language for RDF graphs. In its strict instantiation, it only offers querying according to the RDF semantics and would thus ignore the semantics of data expressed with respect to (RDF) schemas or (OWL) ontologies. Several extensions to SPARQL have been proposed to query RDF data modulo RDFS, i.e., interpreting the query with RDFS semantics and/or considering external ontologies. We introduce a general framework which allows for expressing query answering modulo a particular semantics in an homogeneous way. In this paper, we discuss extensions of SPARQL that use reg…
The problem of answering queries posed to a peer who is a member of a peer-to-peer data exchange system is studied. The answers have to be consistent wrt to both the local semantic constraints and the data exchange constraints with other peers; and must also respect certain trust relationships between peers. A semantics for peer consistent answers under exchange constraints and trust relationships is introduced and some techniques for obtaining those answers are presented.
A database D may be inconsistent wrt a given set IC of integrity constraints. Consistent Query Answering (CQA) is the problem of computing from D the answers to a query that are consistent wrt IC . Consistent answers are invariant under all the repairs of D, i.e. the consistent instances that minimally depart from D. Three classes of repair have been considered in the literature: those that minimize set-theoretically the set of tuples in the symmetric difference; those that minimize the changes of attribute values, and those that minimize the cardinality of the set of tuples in the symmetric d…
Matching dependencies (MDs) were introduced to specify the identification or matching of certain attribute values in pairs of database tuples when some similarity conditions are satisfied. Their enforcement can be seen as a natural generalization of entity resolution. In what we call the "pure case" of MDs, any value from the underlying data domain can be used for the value in common that does the matching. We investigate the semantics and properties of data cleaning through the enforcement of matching dependencies for the pure case. We characterize the intended clean instances and also the "c…
The chase algorithm is a fundamental tool for query evaluation and query containment under constraints, where the constraints are (sub-classes of) tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and equality generating depencies (EGDs). So far, most of the research on this topic has focused on cases where the chase procedure terminates, with some notable exceptions. In this paper we take a general approach, and we propose large classes of TGDs under which the chase does not always terminate. Our languages, in particular, are inspired by guarded logic: we show that by enforcing syntactic properties on the…
Open-world query answering is the problem of deciding, given a set of facts, conjunction of constraints, and query, whether the facts and constraints imply the query. This amounts to reasoning over all instances that include the facts and satisfy the constraints. We study finite open-world query answering (FQA), which assumes that the underlying world is finite and thus only considers the finite completions of the instance. The major known decidable cases of FQA derive from the following: the guarded fragment of first-order logic, which can express referential constraints (data in one place po…
Consider the situation where a query is to be answered using Web sources that restrict the accesses that can be made on backend relational data by requiring some attributes to be given as input of the service. The accesses provide lookups on the collection of attributes values that match the binding. They can differ in whether or not they require arguments to be generated from prior accesses. Prior work has focused on the question of whether a query can be answered using a set of data sources, and in developing static access plans (e.g., Datalog programs) that implement query answering. We are…
Matching dependencies (MDs) have been recently introduced as declarative rules for entity resolution (ER), i.e. for identifying and resolving duplicates in relational instance $D$. A set of MDs can be used as the basis for a possibly non-deterministic mechanism that computes a duplicate-free instance from $D$. The possible results of this process are the clean, "minimally resolved instances" (MRIs). There might be several MRIs for $D$, and the "resolved answers" to a query are those that are shared by all the MRIs. We investigate the problem of computing resolved answers. We look at various se…
We address the problem of semantic querying of relational databases (RDB) modulo knowledge bases using very expressive knowledge representation formalisms, such as full first-order logic or its various fragments. We propose to use a first-order logic (FOL) reasoner for computing schematic answers to deductive queries, with the subsequent instantiation of these schematic answers using a conventional relational DBMS. In this research note, we outline the main idea of this technique -- using abstractions of databases and constrained clauses for deriving schematic answers. The proposed method can …
We consider a semantic class, weakly-chase-sticky (WChS), and a syntactic subclass, jointly-weakly-sticky (JWS), of Datalog+- programs. Both extend that of weakly-sticky (WS) programs, which appear in our applications to data quality. For WChS programs we propose a practical, polynomial-time query answering algorithm (QAA). We establish that the two classes are closed under magic-sets rewritings. As a consequence, QAA can be applied to the optimized programs. QAA takes as inputs the program (including the query) and semantic information about the "finiteness" of predicate positions. For the sy…
Counting Still Counts: Understanding Neural Complex Query Answering Through Query Relaxation
Translational AI Laboratory, Department of Laboratory Medicine Amsterdam University Medical Center, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心转化人工智能实验室，实验室医学系，自由大学阿姆斯特丹）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（自由大学阿姆斯特丹）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；ELLIS Institute Finland & Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland（芬兰埃利斯研究所及图尔库芬兰阿博阿卡迪米大学）；Elsevier discovery lab, Amsterdam（埃斯勒尔发现实验室，阿姆斯特丹）
Consistent Query Answering (CQA) is the problem of computing from a database the answers to a query that are consistent with respect to certain integrity constraints that the database, as a whole, may fail to satisfy. Consistent answers have been characterized as those that are invariant under certain minimal forms of restoration of the database consistency. We investigate algorithmic and complexity theoretic issues of CQA under database repairs that minimally depart -wrt the cardinality of the symmetric difference- from the original database. We obtain first tight complexity bounds. We also a…
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）；Discovery Lab, Elsevier（爱思唯尔发现实验室）
Large, heterogeneous datasets are characterized by missing or even erroneous information. This is more evident when they are the product of community effort or automatic fact extraction methods from external sources, such as text. A special case of the aforementioned phenomenon can be seen in knowledge graphs, where this mostly appears in the form of missing or incorrect edges and nodes. Structured querying on such incomplete graphs will result in incomplete sets of answers, even if the correct entities exist in the graph, since one or more edges needed to match the pattern are missing. To ove…
Answering logical queries over incomplete knowledge bases is challenging because: 1) it calls for implicit link prediction, and 2) brute force answering of existential first-order logic queries is exponential in the number of existential variables. Recent work of query embeddings provides fast querying, but most approaches model set logic with closed regions, so lack negation. Query embeddings that do support negation use densities that suffer drawbacks: 1) only improvise logic, 2) use expensive distributions, and 3) poorly model answer uncertainty. In this paper, we propose Logic Embeddings, …
So-called combined approaches answer a conjunctive query over a description logic ontology in three steps: first, they materialise certain consequences of the ontology and the data; second, they evaluate the query over the data; and third, they filter the result of the second phase to eliminate unsound answers. Such approaches were developed for various members of the DL-Lite and the EL families of languages, but none of them can handle ontologies containing nominals. In our work, we bridge this gap and present a combined query answering approach for ELHO---a logic that contains all features o…
Open-world query answering is the problem of deciding, given a set of facts, conjunction of constraints, and query, whether the facts and constraints imply the query. This amounts to reasoning over all instances that include the facts and satisfy the constraints. We study finite open-world query answering (FQA), which assumes that the underlying world is finite and thus only considers the finite completions of the instance. The major known decidable cases of FQA derive from the following: the guarded fragment of first-order logic, which can express referential constraints (data in one place po…
Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data（千禧数据基础研究所）
Consistent answers to a query from a possibly inconsistent database are answers that are simultaneously retrieved from every possible repair of the database. Repairs are consistent instances that minimally differ from the original inconsistent instance. It has been shown before that database repairs can be specified as the stable models of a disjunctive logic program. In this paper we show how to use the repair programs to transform the problem of consistent query answering into a problem of reasoning w.r.t. a theory written in second-order predicate logic. It also investigated how a first-ord…
Most differentially private mechanisms are designed for the use of a single analyst. In reality, however, there are often multiple stakeholders with different and possibly conflicting priorities that must share the same privacy loss budget. This motivates the problem of equitable budget-sharing for multi-analyst differential privacy. Our previous work defined desiderata that any mechanism in this space should satisfy and introduced methods for budget-sharing in the offline case where queries are known in advance. We extend our previous work on multi-analyst differentially private query answeri…
Huazhong University of Technology & Science（华中科技大学）；Western Sydney University（西悉尼大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Existential rules, also known as data dependencies in Databases, have been recently rediscovered as a promising family of languages for Ontology-based Query Answering. In this paper, we prove that disjunctive embedded dependencies exactly capture the class of recursively enumerable ontologies in Ontology-based Conjunctive Query Answering (OCQA). Our expressive completeness result does not rely on any built-in linear order on the database. To establish the expressive completeness, we introduce a novel semantic definition for OCQA ontologies. We also show that neither the class of disjunctive tu…
