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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Combining Semantic Web Search with the Power of Inductive Reasoning</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Claudia d'Amato</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Nicola Fanizzi</string-name>
          <email>fanizzig@di.uniba.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Bettina Fazzinga</string-name>
          <email>bfazzinga@deis.unical.it</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Georg Gottlob</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">4</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Thomas Lukasiewicz</string-name>
          <email>thomas.lukasiewiczg@comlab.ox.ac.uk</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford</institution>
          ,
          <country country="UK">UK</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Universita` della Calabria</institution>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita` degli Studi di Bari</institution>
          ,
          <country country="IT">Italy</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>Institut fu ̈ r Informationssysteme</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>TU Wien</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="AT">Austria</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff4">
          <label>4</label>
          <institution>Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford</institution>
          ,
          <country country="UK">UK</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <fpage>15</fpage>
      <lpage>26</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>Extensive research activities are recently directed towards the Semantic Web as a future form of the Web. Consequently, Web search as the key technology of the Web is evolving towards some novel form of Semantic Web search. A very promising recent approach to such Semantic Web search is based on combining standard Web search with ontological background knowledge and using standard Web search engines as the main inference motor of Semantic Web search. In this paper, we propose to further enhance this approach to Semantic Web search by the use of inductive reasoning techniques. This adds especially the important ability to handle inconsistencies, noise, and incompleteness, which are very likely to occur in distributed and heterogeneous environments, such as the Web. We report on a prototype implementation of the new approach and experimental results.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        Web search [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] as the key technology of the Web is about to change radically with the
development of the Semantic Web [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ]. As a consequence, the elaboration of a new search
technology for the Semantic Web, called Semantic Web search [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ], is currently an
extremely hot topic, both in Web-related companies and in academic research. In particular,
there is a fast growing number of commercial and academic Semantic Web search
engines. The research can be roughly divided into two main directions. The first (and most
common) one is to develop a new form of search for searching the pieces of data and
knowledge that are encoded in the new representation formalisms of the Semantic Web
(e.g., [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]), while the second (and less explored) direction is to use the data and knowledge
of the Semantic Web in order to add some semantics to Web search (e.g., [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]).
      </p>
      <p>
        A very promising recent representative of the second direction to Semantic Web search
has been presented in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ]. The approach is based on (i) using ontological (unions of)
conjunctive queries (which may contain negated subqueries) as Semantic Web search queries,
(ii) combining standard Web search with ontological background knowledge, (iii) using
the power of Semantic Web formalisms and technologies, and (iv) using standard Web
search engines as the main inference motor of Semantic Web search. It consists of an
offline ontology compilation step, based on deductive reasoning techniques, and an online
query processing step. In this paper, we propose to further enhance this approach to
Semantic Web search by the use of inductive reasoning techniques for the offline ontology
compilation step. To our knowledge, this is the first combination of Semantic Web search
with inductive reasoning. The paper’s main contributions can be summarized as follows:
– We develop a combination of Semantic Web search as presented in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] with an
inductive reasoning technique (based on similarity search [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] for retrieving the resources
that likely belong to a query concept [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]). The latter serves in an offline ontology
compilation step to compute completed semantic annotations.
– Importantly, the new approach to Semantic Web search can handle inconsistencies,
noise, and incompleteness in Semantic Web knowledge bases, which are all very likely
to occur in distributed and heterogeneous environments, such as the Web. We provide
several examples illustrating this important advantage of the new approach.
– We report on a prototype implementation of the new approach in the context of desktop
search. We also provide very positive experimental results for the precision and the
recall of the new approach, comparing it to the deductive approach in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>System Overview</title>
      <p>The overall architecture of our Semantic Web search system is shown in Fig. 1. It consists
of the Interface, the Query Evaluator, and the Inference Engine (Fig. 1, dark parts), where
the Query Evaluator is implemented on top of standard Web Search Engines. Standard
Web pages and their objects are enriched by Annotation pages, based on an Ontology.</p>
      <p>
        We thus assume that there are semantic annotations to standard Web pages and to
objects on standard Web pages. Note that such annotations are starting to be widely available
for a large class of Web resources, especially with the Web 2.0. Semantic annotations
about Web pages and objects may also be automatically learned from the Web pages and
the objects to be annotated (see, e.g., [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ]), and/or they may be extracted from existing
ontological knowledge bases on the Semantic Web. Another important standard assumption
that we make is that Web pages and their objects have unique identifiers.
      </p>
      <p>For example, in a very simple scenario, a Web page i1 may contain information about a
Ph.D. student i2, called Mary, and two of her papers, namely, a conference paper i3 entitled
“Semantic Web search” and a journal paper i4 entitled “Semantic Web search engines” and
published in 2008. A simple HTML page representing this scenario is shown in Fig. 2,
left side. There may now exist one semantic annotation each for the Web page, the Ph.D.
student Mary, the journal paper, and the conference paper. The annotation for the Web
page may simply encode that it mentions Mary and the two papers, while the one for Mary
may encode that she is a Ph.D. student with the name Mary and the author of the papers
i3 and i4. The annotation for the paper i3 may encode that i3 is a conference paper and
has the title “Semantic Web search”, while the one for the paper i4 may encode that i4
is a journal paper, authored by Mary, has the title “Semantic Web search engines”, was
published in 2008, and has the keyword “RDF”. The semantic annotations of i1, i2, i3,
and i4 are formally expressed as the sets of axioms Ai1 , Ai2 , Ai3 , and Ai4 , respectively:
Ai1 = fcontains(i1; i2); contains(i1; i3); contains(i1; i4)g;
Ai2 = fPhDStudent(i2); name(i2; \mary"); isAuthorOf(i2; i3); isAuthorOf(i2; i4)g;
Ai3 = fConferencePaper(i3); title(i3; \Semantic Web search")g;
Ai4 = fJournalPaper(i4); hasAuthor(i4; i2); title(i4; \Semantic Web search engines");
yearOfPublication(i4; 2008); keyword(i4; “RDF”)g:
(1)
Inference Engine. Using an ontology containing some background knowledge, these
semantic annotations are then further enhanced in an offline ontology compilation step,
where the Inference Engine adds all properties that can be deduced from the semantic
Interface</p>
      <p>Query
Evaluator
Search
Engine
Inference
Engine</p>
      <p>Web
Annotations</p>
      <p>
        Ontology
annotations and the ontology. In [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], we assume a deductive such step, while here we
propose and explore an inductive one. The resulting (completed) semantic annotations are then
published as Web pages, so that they can be searched by standard Web search engines. For
example, an ontology may contain the knowledge that (i) conference and journal papers
are articles, (ii) conference papers are not journal papers, (iii) isAuthorOf relates
scientists and articles, (iv) isAuthorOf is the inverse of hasAuthor, and (v) hasFirstAuthor is a
functional binary relationship, which is formally expressed by:
      </p>
      <p>ConferencePaper v Article; JournalPaper v Article; ConferencePaper v :JournalPaper;
9isAuthorOf v Scientist; 9isAuthorOf v Article; isAuthorOf v hasAuthor;
hasAuthor v isAuthorOf; (funct hasFirstAuthor):
(2)
Using this ontological knowledge, we can derive from the above annotations that the two
papers i3 and i4 are also articles, and both authored by John. These resulting searchable
(completed) semantic annotations of (objects on) standard Web pages are published as
HTML Web pages with pointers to the respective object pages, so that they (in addition
to the standard Web pages) can be searched by standard search engines. For example, the
HTML pages for the completed semantic annotations of the above Ai1 , Ai2 , Ai3 , and Ai4
are shown in Fig. 2, right side. Note that on the HTML page of each individual, its identifier
is located beside the atomic concept below the row specifying the URIs. Practically, such
an identifier may simply be the HTML address of the Web page/object’s annotation page.
For example, considering the HTML pages of Fig. 2, the individual described by p4 is i4,
and the one described by p2 is i2. Observe that we use a plain textual representation of
the completed semantic annotations in order to allow their processing by existing standard
search engines for the Web. It is important to point out that this textual representation
is simply a list of properties, each eventually along with an identifier or a data value as
attribute value, and it can thus immediately be encoded as a list of RDF triples.
Query Evaluator. The Query Evaluator (see Fig. 1) reduces each Semantic Web search
query of the user in an online query processing step to a sequence of standard Web search
queries on standard Web and annotation pages, which are then processed by a standard
Web Search Engine. The Query Evaluator also collects the results and re-transforms them
into a single answer which is returned to the user. As an example of a Semantic Web search
query, one may ask for all Ph.D. students who have published an article in 2008 with RDF
as a keyword, which is formally expressed as follows:</p>
      <p>Q(x) = 9y (PhDStudent(x) ^ isAuthorOf(x; y) ^ Article(y) ^</p>
      <p>yearOfPublication(y; 2008) ^ keyword(y; \RDF ”)) :
This query is transformed into the two queries Q1 = PhDStudent AND isAuthorOf and
Q2 = Article AND “yearOfPublication 2008” AND “keyword RDF”, which can both be
submitted to a standard Web search engine, such as Google. The result of the original
query Q is then built from the results of the two queries Q1 and Q2. Note that a graphical
user interface, such as the one of Google’s advanced search, or even a natural language
interface can help to hide the conceptual complexity of ontological queries to the user.
3</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Semantic Web Search</title>
      <p>
        We now introduce Semantic Web knowledge bases and the syntax and semantics of
Semantic Web search queries to such knowledge bases. We then generalize the PageRank
technique to our approach. We assume the reader is familiar with the syntax and the
semantics of Description Logics (DLs) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ], which we use as underlying ontology languages.
Semantic Web Knowledge Bases. Intuitively, a Semantic Web knowledge base consists
of a background TBox and a collection of ABoxes, one for every concrete Web page
and for every object on a Web page. For example, the homepage of a scientist may be
such a concrete Web page and be associated with an ABox, while the publications on the
homepage may be such objects, which are also associated with one ABox each.
      </p>
      <p>We assume pairwise disjoint sets D, A, RA, RD, I, and V of atomic datatypes, atomic
concepts, atomic roles, atomic attributes, individuals, and data values, respectively. Let I
be the disjoint union of two sets P and O of Web pages and Web objects, respectively.
Informally, every p 2 P is an identifier for a concrete Web page, while every o 2 O is
an identifier for a concrete object on a concrete Web page. We assume the atomic roles
links to between Web pages and contains between Web pages and Web objects. The former
represents the link structure between concrete Web pages, while the latter encodes the
occurrences of concrete Web objects on concrete Web pages.</p>
      <p>Definition 1. A semantic annotation Aa for a Web page or object a 2 P [ O is a finite
set of concept membership axioms A(a), role membership axioms P (a; b), and attribute
membership axioms U (a; v), where A 2 A, P 2 RA, U 2 RD, b 2 I, and v 2 V. A
Semantic Web knowledge base KB = (T ; (Aa)a 2 P[O) consists of a TBox T and one semantic
annotation Aa for every Web page and object a 2 P [ O.</p>
      <p>Informally, a Semantic Web knowledge base consists of some background
terminological knowledge and some assertional knowledge for every concrete Web page and for every
concrete object on a Web page. The background terminological knowledge may be an
ontology from some global Semantic Web repository or an ontology defined locally by the
user site. In contrast to the background terminological knowledge, the assertional
knowledge will be directly stored on the Web (on annotation pages like the described standard
Web pages) and is thus accessible via Web search engines.</p>
      <p>Example 1. (Scientific Database). We use a DL knowledge base KB = (T ; A) to
specify some simple information about scientists and their publications. The sets of atomic
concepts, atomic roles, atomic attributes, and data values are:</p>
      <p>A = fScientist; Article; ConferencePaper; JournalPaperg;
RA = fhasAuthor; isAuthorOf; containsg; RD = fname; title; yearOfPublicationg;
V = f\mary"; \Semantic Web search"; 2008; \Semantic Web search engines"g:
Let I = P [ O be the set of individuals, where P = fi1g is the set of Web pages, and O =
fi2; i3; i4g is the set of Web objects on the Web page i1. The TBox T contains the axioms
in Eq. 2. Then, a Semantic Web knowledge base is given by KB = (T ; (Aa)a 2 P[O),
where the semantic annotations of the individuals in P [ O are the ones in Eq. 1.
Semantic Web Search Queries. We use unions of conjunctive queries with negated
conjunctive subqueries as Semantic Web search queries to Semantic Web knowledge bases.
We now first define the syntax of Semantic Web search queries and then the semantics of
positive and general such queries.</p>
      <p>Syntax. Let X be a finite set of variables. A term is either a Web page p 2 P, a Web object
o 2 O, a data value v 2 V, or a variable x 2 X. An atomic formula (or atom) is of one
of the following forms: (i) d(t), where d is an atomic datatype, and t is a term; (ii) A(t),
where A is an atomic concept, and t is a term; (iii) P (t; t0), where P is an atomic role,
and t; t0 are terms; and (iv) U (t; t0), where U is an atomic attribute, and t; t0 are terms. An
equality has the form =(t; t0), where t and t0 are terms. A conjunctive formula 9y (x; y)
is an existentially quantified conjunction of atoms and equalities =(t; t0), which have
free variables among x and y.</p>
      <p>Definition 2. A Semantic Web search query Q(x) is an expression Win=1 9yi i(x; yi),
where each i with i 2 f1; : : : ; ng is a conjunction of atoms (also called positive atoms),
negated conjunctive formulas not , and equalities =(t; t0), which have free variables
among x and yi, and the x’s are exactly the free variables of Win=1 9yi i(x; yi).</p>
      <p>Intuitively, Semantic Web search queries are unions of conjunctive queries, which may
contain negated conjunctive queries in addition to atoms and equalities as conjuncts.
Example 2. (Scientific Database cont’d). Two Semantic Web search queries are:
Q1(x) = (Scientist(x) ^ not doctoralDegree(x; \oxford university") ^ worksFor(x;
\oxford university")) _ (Scientist(x) ^ doctoralDegree(x; \oxford university") ^
not worksFor(x; \oxford university"));
Q2(x) = 9y (Scientist(x) ^ worksFor(x; \oxford university") ^ isAuthorOf(x; y)^
not ConferencePaper(y) ^ not 9z yearOfPublication(y; z)):
Informally, Q1(x) asks for scientists who are either working for oxford university and did
not receive their Ph.D. from that university, or who received their Ph.D. from oxford
university but do not work for it. Whereas query Q2(x) asks for scientists of oxford university
who are authors of at least one unpublished non-conference paper. Note that when
searching for scientists, the system automatically searches for all subconcepts (known according
to the background ontology), such as e.g. Ph.D. students or computer scientists.
Semantics of Positive Search Queries. We now define the semantics of positive Semantic
Web search queries, which are free of negations, in terms of ground substitutions via the
notion of logical consequence.</p>
      <p>A search query Q(x) is positive iff it contains no negated conjunctive subqueries. A
(variable) substitution maps variables from X to terms. A substitution is ground iff it
maps to Web pages p 2 P, Web objects o 2 O, and data values v 2 V. A closed first-order
formula is a logical consequence of a knowledge base KB = (T ; (Aa)a2P[O), denoted
KB j= , iff every first-order model I of T [ Sa2P[O Aa also satisfies .
Definition 3. Given a Semantic Web knowledge base KB and a positive Semantic Web
search query Q(x), an answer for Q(x) to KB is a ground substitution for the variables x
(which are exactly the free variables of Q(x)) with KB j= Q(x ).</p>
      <p>Example 3. (Scientific Database cont’d). Consider the Semantic Web knowledge base KB
of Example 1 and the following positive Semantic Web search query, asking for all
scientists who author at least one published journal paper:</p>
      <p>Q(x) = 9y (Scientist(x) ^ isAuthorOf(x; y) ^ JournalPaper(y) ^ 9z yearOfPublication(y; z)):</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>An answer for Q(x) to KB is</title>
        <p>= fx=i2g. Recall that i2 represents the scientist Mary.</p>
        <p>
          Semantics of General Search Queries. We next define the semantics of general
Semantic Web search queries by reduction to the semantics of positive ones, interpreting
negated conjunctive subqueries not as the lack of evidence about the truth of . That is,
negations are interpreted by a closed-world semantics on top of the open-world semantics
of DLs (we refer to [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
          ] for more motivation and background).
        </p>
        <p>Definition 4. Given a Semantic Web knowledge base KB and search query
Q(x) = Win=1 9yi i;1(x; yi) ^
^ i;li (x; yi) ^ not i;li+1(x; yi) ^
^ not i;mi (x; yi) ;
an answer for Q(x) to KB is a ground substitution for the variables x such that KB j=
Q+(x ) and KB 6j= Q (x ), where Q+(x) and Q (x) are defined as follows:
QQ+((xx)) == WWiinn==11 99yyii ii;;11((xx;; yyii)) ^^
^ i;li (x; yi) and
^ i;li (x; yi) ^ ( i;li+1(x; yi) _
_ i;mi (x; yi)) :</p>
        <p>Roughly, a ground substitution is an answer for Q(x) to KB iff (i) is an answer for
Q+(x) to KB , and (ii) is not an answer for Q (x) to KB , where Q+(x) is the positive
part of Q(x), while Q (x) is the positive part of Q(x) combined with the complement of
the negative one. Observe that both Q+(x) and Q (x) are positive queries.
Example 4. (Scientific Database cont’d). Consider the Semantic Web knowledge base
KB = (T ; (Aa)a2P[O) of Example 1 and the following general Semantic Web search
query, asking for Mary’s unpublished non-journal papers:</p>
        <p>Q(x) = 9y (Article(x) ^ hasAuthor(x; y) ^ name(y; \mary") ^ not JournalPaper(x) ^
not 9z yearOfPublication(x; z)):
An answer for Q(x) to KB is given by = fx=i3g. Recall that i3 represents an
unpublished conference paper entitled “Semantic Web search”. Observe that the membership
axioms Article(i3) and hasAuthor(i2; i3) do not appear in the semantic annotations Aa
with a 2 P [ O, but they can be inferred from them using the background ontology T .
Ranking Answers. As for the ranking of all answers for a Semantic Web search query
Q to a Semantic Web knowledge base KB (i.e., ground substitutions for all free variables
in Q, which correspond to tuples of Web pages, Web objects, and data values), we use a
generalization of the PageRank technique: rather than considering only Web pages and the
link structure between Web pages (expressed through the role links to here), we also
consider Web objects, which may occur on Web pages (expressed through the role contains),
and which may also be related to other Web objects via other roles. More concretely, we
define the ObjectRank of a Web page or an object a as follows:</p>
        <p>R(a) = d Pb2Ba R(b) = Nb + (1
d) E(a) ;
where (i) Ba is the set of all Web pages and Web objects that relate to a, (ii) Nb is the
number of Web pages and Web objects that relate from b, (iii) d is a damping factor, and
(iv) E associates with every Web page and every Web object a source of rank.
4</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Deductive Offline Ontology Compilation</title>
      <p>
        In this section, we describe the (deductive) offline ontology reasoning step, which
compiles the implicit terminological knowledge in the TBox of a Semantic Web knowledge
base into explicit membership axioms in the ABox, i.e., in the semantic annotations of
Web pages / objects, so that it (in addition to the standard Web pages) can be searched by
standard Web search engines. For the online query processing step, see [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>The compilation of TBox knowledge into ABox knowledge is formalized as follows.
Given a satisfiable Semantic Web knowledge base KB = (T ; (Aa)a2P[O), the simple
completion of KB is the Semantic Web knowledge base KB 0 = (;; (Aa0)a2P[O) such
that every Aa0 is the set of all concept memberships A(a), role memberships P (a; b), and
attribute memberships U (a; v) that logically follow from T [ S
P 2 RA, U 2 RD, b 2 I, and v 2 V. Informally, for every Web paag2eP[anOdAobaj,ewcth,etrheeAsim2pAle,
completion collects all available and deducible facts (whose predicate symbols shall be
usable in search queries) in a completed semantic annotation.</p>
      <p>Example 5. Consider the TBox T of Example 1 and the semantic annotations (Aa)a 2 P[O
of Example 1. The simple completion contains in particular the new axioms Article(i3),
hasAuthor(i3; i2), and Article(i4). The first two are added to Ai3 and the last one to Ai4 .</p>
      <p>
        As shown in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], general quantifier-free search queries to a Semantic Web knowledge
base KB over DL-LiteA [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ] as underlying DL can be evaluated on the simple completion
of KB (which contains only compiled but no explicit TBox knowledge anymore). Similar
results hold when the TBox of KB is equivalent to a Datalog program, and the query is
fully general. Hence, the simple completion assures (i) always a sound query processing
and (ii) a complete query processing in many cases. For this reason, and since
completeness of query processing is actually not that much an issue in the inherently incomplete
Web, we propose to use the simple completion as the basis of our Semantic Web search.
      </p>
      <p>Once the completed semantic annotations are computed, we encode them as HTML
pages, so that they are searchable via standard keyword search. Specifically, we build
one HTML page for the semantic annotation Aa of each individual a 2 P [ O. That is, for
each individual a, we build a page p containing all the atomic concepts whose argument
is a and all the atomic roles/attributes where the first argument is a (see Section 2).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5 Inductive Offline Ontology Compilation</title>
      <p>
        We now describe an inductive inference based on similarity search, which we propose
to use instead of deductive inference for offline ontology compilation in our approach to
Semantic Web search. Section 6 then summarizes the central advantages of this proposal.
Inductive Inference Based on Similarity Search. In similarity search [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ], the basic
idea is to find the most similar object(s) to a query object (i.e., the one to be classified)
with respect to a similarity (or dissimilarity) measure. We review the basics of the
knearest-neighbor (k-NN) method applied to the Semantic Web context [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. The objective
is to induce an approximation for a discrete-valued target hypothesis function h : IS ! V
from a space of instances IS to a set of values V = fv1; : : : ; vsg standing for the classes
(concepts) that have to be predicted. Let xq be the query instance whose class-membership
is to be determined. Using a dissimilarity measure, the set of the k-nearest (pre-classified)
training instances relative to xq is selected: NN (xq) = fx1; : : : ; xkg. Hence, the k-NN
algorithm approximates h for classifying xq on the grounds of the value that h is known to
assume for the training instances in NN (xq). Precisely, the value is decided by means of a
weighted majority voting procedure: it is the most voted value by the instances in NN (xq)
weighted by the similarity of the neighbor individual. The estimate of the hypothesis
function for the query individual is:
k
h^(xq) := argmax X wi (v; h(xi)) ;
v2V i=1
(3)
where returns 1 in case of matching arguments and 0 otherwise, and, given a dissimilarity
measure d, the weights wi are determined by wi = 1=d(xi; xq).
      </p>
      <p>Observe that this setting assigns to the query instance xq a value, which stands for
one in a set of pairwise disjoint concepts (corresponding to the value set V ). In a
multirelational setting, as those of the Semantic Web (SW) context, this assumption cannot be
made in general, since it is well known that an individual may be an instance of more
than one concept. The problem is also related to the closed-world assumption (CWA)
usually made in the knowledge discovery context. To deal with the open-world
assumption (OWA), generally adopted for the SW representations, the absence of information on
whether a training instance x belongs to the extension of a query concept Q should not be
interpreted negatively, as in the standard settings which adopt the CWA, rather, it should
count as neutral (uncertain) information. Assuming this alternate viewpoint, the
multiclass classification problem is transformed into a ternary one and the V = f+1; 1; 0g
value set is adopted for the classification of an individual with respect to a query concept
Q and where the three values denote, respectively, membership, non-membership, and
uncertainty. Hence, the task is cast as follows: given a query concept Q, determine the
membership of an instance xq through the NN procedure (see Eq. 3) where V = f 1; 0; +1g
and the hypothesis function values for the training instances are determined as:
hQ(x) =</p>
      <p>That is, the value of hQ for the training instances is determined by logical entailment
(denoted j=) of the corresponding assertion from the knowledge base. Alternatively, a look-up
in the ABox of the knowledge base could be considered, thus obtaining a classification
process less complex but also possibly less accurate.</p>
      <p>
        For measuring the similarity between individuals, a totally semantic and language
independent family of dissimilarity measures has been used [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. It is based on the idea of
comparing the semantics of the input individuals along a number of dimensions
represented by a committee of concept descriptions, say F = fF1; F2; : : : ; Fmg, which stands
as a group of discriminating features expressed in the OWL-DL sub-language taken into
account. It is formally defined as follows [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]:
Definition 5 (family of measures). Let KB = (T ; A) be a knowledge base. Given a set
of concept descriptions F = fF1; F2; : : : ; Fmg, corresponding weights w1; : : : ; wm, and
p &gt; 0, a family of dissimilarity functions dpF : Ind(A) Ind(A) 7! [0; 1] is defined by:
8a; b 2 Ind(A) :
dpF(a; b) :=
      </p>
      <p>2 jFj
1
F 4X wi j i(a; b) jp5
j j i=1
31=p
;
where the dissimilarity function i (i 2 f1; : : : ; mg) is defined as follows:
8a; b 2 Ind(A) :
i(a; b) =
8 0
&gt;&lt; 1
&gt;: 1=2</p>
      <p>Fi(a) 2 A ^ Fi(b) 2 A
Fi(a) 2 A ^ :Fi(b) 2 A or
:Fi(a) 2 A ^ Fi(b) 2 A
otherwise:</p>
      <p>An alternative definition for the projections requires the entailment of an assertion
(instance-checking) rather than the simple ABox look-up; this can make the measure more
accurate yet more complex to compute. Moreover, using instance checking, induction is
performed on top of deduction, thus making it a kind of completion of deductive reasoning.</p>
      <p>As for the weights wi employed in the family of measures, they should reflect the
impact of the single feature concept Fi relative to the overall dissimilarity. This is
determined by the quantity of information conveyed by a feature, which is measured as its
entropy. Namely, the extension of a feature Fi relative to the whole domain of objects may
be probabilistically quantified as PFi = jFiI j=j I j (relative to the canonical
interpretation I). This can be roughly approximated by jretrieval(Fi)j=jInd(A)j. Hence, considering
also the probability P:Fi related to its negation and the one related to the unclassified
individuals (relative to Fi), denoted PU , we may give an entropic measure for the feature:
H(Fi) =</p>
      <p>(PFi log(PFi ) + P:Fi log(P:Fi ) + PU log(PU )) :</p>
      <p>
        The measures strongly depend on F. Here, we make the assumption that the feature-set
F represents a sufficient number of (possibly redundant) features that are able to
discriminate really different individuals. However, an optimal discriminating feature set could be
learned [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Experimentally, we obtained good results by using the very set of both
primitive and defined concepts found in the knowledge base [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Measuring the Likelihood of an Answer. The inductive inference made by the
procedure shown above is not guaranteed to be deductively valid. Indeed, inductive inference
naturally yields a certain degree of uncertainty. So, from a more general perspective, the
main idea behind the above inductive inference for Semantic Web search is closely
related to the idea of using probabilistic ontologies to increase the precision and the recall of
querying databases and of information retrieval in general. But, rather than learning
probabilistic ontologies from data, representing probabilistic ontologies, and reasoning with
probabilistic ontologies, we directly use the data in the inductive inference step.</p>
      <p>In order to measure the likelihood of the decision made by the inductive procedure
(individual xq belongs to the query concept denoted by value v maximizing the argmax
argument in Eq. 3), given the k-nearest training individuals in NN (xq) = fx1; : : : ; xkg,
the quantity that determined the decision should be normalized by dividing it by the sum of
such arguments over the (three) possible values:
l(class(xq) = vjNN (xq)) =</p>
      <p>Pik=1 wi
Pv02V Pik=1 wi
(v; hQ(xi))
(v0; hQ(xi))
:
(4)</p>
      <p>Hence, the likelihood of the assertion Q(xq) corresponds to the case when v = +1.
The computed likelihood can be used for building a probabilistic ABox (which is a
collection of pairs, each consisting of a classical ABox axiom and a probability value).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>6 Inconsistencies, Noise, and Incompleteness</title>
      <p>In this section, we illustrate the main advantages of using inductive reasoning in
Semantic Web search, namely, that inductive reasoning (differently from deductive reasoning)
can handle inconsistencies, noise, and incompleteness in Semantic Web knowledge bases,
which are all very likely to occur when knowledge bases are stored in a distributed and
heterogeneous fashion, like on the Web.</p>
      <p>Inconsistencies. Since our inductive method is based on the majority vote of the
individuals in the neighborhood, it may be able to give a correct classification even in the case of
inconsistent knowledge bases. This aspect is illustrated by the following example.
Example 6. Consider the description logic knowledge base KB = (T ; A) that consists of
the following TBox T and ABox A:</p>
      <p>T = fMan Male u Human; Professor Person u 9abilitatedTo:Teaching u
9isSupervisorOf:PhDThesis u Researcher; Researcher GraduatePerson u
9worksFor:ResearchInstitute u :9isSupervisorOf:PhDThesis; : : :g ;
A = fProfessor(Franz); isSupervisorOf(Franz; DLThesis); Professor(John);
isSupervisorOf(John; RoboticsThesis); Professor(Flo); isSupervisorOf(Flo; MLThesis);
Researcher(Nick); Researcher(Ann); isSupervisorOf(Nick; SWThesis); : : :g :
Actually, Nick is a Professor, indeed, he is the supervisor of a PhD thesis in A. However,
by human mistake, he is asserted to be a Researcher in A, and by the axiom for Researcher
in T , he cannot be the supervisor of any PhD thesis. Hence, KB is inconsistent, and thus a
deductive reasoner cannot answer whether Nick is a Professor or not (since everything can
be deduced from an inconsistent knowledge base). On the contrary, by inductive reasoning,
it is highly probable that the returned classification result is that Nick is an instance of
Professor. This is because the most similar individuals are Franz, John, and Flo, and all of
them vote for the concept Professor.</p>
      <p>Noise. Inductive reasoning may also be able to give a correct classification in the presence
of noise in a knowledge base (containing, e.g., incorrect concept and/or role membership
assertions), which is illustrated by the following example.</p>
      <p>Example 7. Consider the description logic knowledge base KB = (T 0; A), where the
ABox A is as in Example 6 and the TBox T 0 is obtained from the TBox T of Example 6
by replacing the axiom for Researcher by the following axiom:</p>
      <p>Researcher</p>
      <p>GraduatePerson u 9worksFor:ResearchInstitute :
Again, Nick is actually a Professor, but by human mistake asserted to be a Researcher
in KB . But due to the slightly modified axiom for Researcher, there is no inconsistency
in KB anymore. By deductive reasoning, however, Nick turns out to be a Researcher,
whereas by inductive reasoning, it is highly probable that the returned classification result
is that Nick is an instance of Professor, as above, because the most similar individuals are
Franz, John, and Flo, and all of them vote for the concept Professor.
Incompleteness. Clearly, inductive reasoning may also be able to give a correct
classification in the presence of incompleteness in a knowledge base. That is, inductive reasoning
is not necessarily deductively valid, and may produce new knowledge.</p>
      <p>Example 8. Consider the description logic knowledge base KB = (T 0; A0), where the
TBox T 0 is as in Example 7 and the ABox A0 is obtained from the ABox A of
Example 6 by removing the axiom Researcher(Nick). Then, the resulting knowledge base is
neither inconsistent nor noisy, but it is now incomplete. Nonetheless, by the same line of
argumentation as in Examples 6 and 7, it is highly probable that the classification result by
inductive reasoning is that Nick is an instance of Professor.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>7 Implementation and Experiments</title>
      <p>In this section, we describe our prototype implementation for a semantic desktop search
engine. Furthermore, we report on very positive experimental results on the precision and
the recall under inductively vs. deductively completed semantic annotations.
Implementation. We have implemented a prototype for a semantic desktop search
engine. We have realized both a deductive and an inductive version of the offline inference
step for generating the completed semantic annotation for every considered resource. The
deductive version uses PELLET1, while the inductive one is based on the k-NN technique,
integrated with an entropic measure, as proposed in Section 5. Specifically, each
individual i of a Semantic Web knowledge base is classified relative to all atomic concepts and
all restrictions 9R :fig with roles R. The parameter k was set to log(jInd(A)j), where
Ind(A) stands for all individuals in the knowledge base. The simpler distances d1F were
employed, using all the atomic concepts in the knowledge base for determining the set F.
Precision and Recall of Inductive Semantic Web Search. We next give an experimental
comparison between Semantic Web search under inductive and under deductive
reasoning. We do this by providing the precision and the recall of the latter vs. the former. Our
experimental results with queries relative to the FINITE-STATE-MACHINE (FSM) and
the SURFACE-WATER-MODEL (SWM) ontology from the Prote´ge´ Ontology Library2 are
summarized in Table 1. For example, Query (8) asks for all transitions having no target
state, while Query (16) asks for all numerical models having either the domain “lake” and
public availability, or the domain “coastalArea” and commercial availability. The
experimental results in Table 1 essentially show that the answer sets under inductive reasoning
are very close to the ones under deductive reasoning.
8</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>Summary and Outlook</title>
      <p>
        We have presented a combination of Semantic Web search as presented in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] with an
inductive reasoning technique, based on similarity search [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] for retrieving the resources
that likely belong to a query concept [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. As a crucial advantage, the new approach to
Semantic Web search allows for handling inconsistencies, noise, and incompleteness, which
are very likely in distributed and heterogeneous environments, such as the Web. We have
also reported on a prototype implementation and very positive experimental results on the
precision and the recall of the new inductive approach to Semantic Web search.
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-8-1">
        <title>1 http://www.mindswap.org</title>
        <p>2 http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Protege Ontology Library</p>
        <p>Onto- Query
logy
1 FSM State(x)
2 FSM StateMachineElement(x)
3 FSM Composite(x) ^ hasStateMachineElement(x; accountDetails)
4 FSM State(y) ^ StateMachineElement(x) ^ hasStateMachineElement(x; y)
5 FSM Action(x) _ Guard(x)
6 FSM 9y; z (State(y) ^ State(z) ^ Transition(x) ^ source(x; y) ^ target(x; z))
7 FSM StateMachineElement(x) ^ not 9y (StateMachineElement(y) ^</p>
        <p>hasStateMachineElement(x; y))
8 FSM Transition(x) ^ not 9y (State(y) ^ target(x; y))
9 FSM 9y (StateMachineElement(x) ^ not hasStateMachineElement(x;</p>
        <p>accountDetails) ^ hasStateMachineElement(x; y) ^ State(y))
10 SWM Model(x)
11 SWM Mathematical(x)
12 SWM Model(x) ^ hasDomain(x; lake) ^ hasDomain(x; river)
13 SWM Model(x) ^ not 9y (Availability(y) ^ hasAvailability(x; y))
14 SWM Model(x) ^ hasDomain(x; river) ^ not hasAvailability(x; public)
16 SWM 9Nyum(Meroicdaell((xx)) ^^ hhaassDDoevmealoinp(exr(;xla;kye))^^UhansivAevrasiiltayb(yil)it)y(x; public)_
15 SWM</p>
        <p>Numerical(x) ^ hasDomain(x; coastalArea) ^
hasAvailability(x; commercial)
34
0</p>
        <p>In the future, we aim especially at extending the desktop implementation to a real Web
implementation, using existing search engines, such as Google. Another interesting topic is
to explore how search expressions that are formulated as plain natural language sentences
can be translated into the ontological conjunctive queries of our approach. It would also
be interesting to investigate the use of probabilistic ontologies rather than classical ones.
Acknowledgments. Georg Gottlob’s work was supported by the EPSRC grant Number
EP/E010865/1 “Schema Mappings and Automated Services for Data Integration.” Georg
Gottlob, whose work was partially carried out at the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative
Finance, gratefully acknowledges support from the Royal Society as the holder of a Royal
Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award. Thomas Lukasiewicz’s work was supported by
the German Research Foundation (DFG) under the Heisenberg Programme.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
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