Completeness Management for RDF Data Sources

Abstract

The Semantic Web is commonly interpreted under the open-world assumption, meaning that information available (e.g., in a data source) captures only a subset of the reality. Therefore, there is no certainty about whether the available information provides a complete representation of the reality. The broad aim of this article is to contribute a formal study of how to describe the completeness of parts of the Semantic Web stored in RDF data sources. We introduce a theoretical framework allowing augmentation of RDF data sources with statements, also expressed in RDF, about their completeness. One immediate benefit of this framework is that now query answers can be complemented with information about their completeness. We study the impact of completeness statements on the complexity of query answering by considering different fragments of the SPARQL language, including the RDFS entailment regime, and the federated scenario. We implement an efficient method for reasoning about query completeness and provide an experimental evaluation in the presence of large sets of completeness statements.