Datalog Revisited for Reasoning in Linked Data

Abstract

Linked Data provides access to huge, continuously growing amounts of open data and ontologies in RDF format that describe entities, links and properties on those entities. Equipping Linked Data with inference paves the way to make the Semantic Web a reality. In this survey, we describe a unifying framework for RDF ontologies and databases that we call deductive RDF triplestores. It consists in equipping RDF triplestores with Datalog inference rules. This rule language allows to capture in a uniform manner OWL constraints that are useful in practice, such as property transitivity or symmetry, but also domain-specific rules with practical relevance for users in many domains of interest. The expressivity and the genericity of this framework is illustrated for modeling Linked Data applications and for developing inference algorithms. In particular, we show how it allows to model the problem of data linkage in Linked Data as a reasoning problem on possibly decentralized data. We also explain how it makes possible to efficiently extract expressive modules from Semantic Web ontologies and databases with formal guarantees, whilst effectively controlling their succinctness. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and its usefulness in practice for data integration and information extraction.