Reasoning on the Web with Open and Closed Predicates

Gerd Wagner, Adrian Giurca, Ion Mircea Diaconescu, Grigoris Antoniou, Anastasia Analyti, Carlos Viegas Damasio

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

SQL, Prolog, RDF and OWL are among the most prominent and most widely used computational logic languages. However, SQL, Prolog and RDF do not allow the representation of negative information, only OWL does so. RDF does not even include any negation concept. While SQL and Prolog only support reasoning with closed predicates based on negation-as-failure, OWL supports reasoning with open predicates based on classical negation, only. However, in many practical application contexts, one rather needs support for reasoning with both open and closed predicates. To support this claim, we show that the well-known Web vocabulary FOAF includes all three kinds of predicates i.e. closed, open and partial predicates. Therefore, reasoning with FOAF data, as a typical example of reasoning on the Web, requires a formalism that supports the distinction between open and closed predicates. We argue that ERDF, an extension of RDF, offers a solution to deal with this problem.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6
Number of pages14
JournalCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Volume434
Publication statusPublished - 2 Feb 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event3rd International Workshop on Applications of Logic Programming to the (Semantic) Web and Web Services: Co-located with the 24th International Conference on Logic Programming - Udine, Italy
Duration: 12 Dec 200812 Dec 2008
Conference number: 3 & 24

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