Answering Continuous Description Logic Queries: Managing Static and Volatile Knowledge in Ontologies

During the last years, mobile computing has been the focus of many research efforts, due mainly to the ever-growing use of mobile devices. In this context, there is a need to manage dynamic data, such as location data or other data provided by sensors. As an example, the continuous processing of location-dependent queries has been the subject of thorough research. However, there is still a need of highly expressive ways of formulating queries, augmenting in this way the systems' answer capabilities. Regarding this issue, the modeling power of Description Logics (DLs) and the inferring capabilities of their attached reasoners could fulfill this new requirement. The main problem is that DLs are inherently oriented to model static knowledge, that is, to capture the nature of the modeled objects, but not to handle changes in the property values (which requires a full ontology reclassification), as it is common in mobile computing environments (e.g., the location is expected to vary continually). In this paper, the authors present a novel approach to process continuous queries that combines 1) the DL reasoning capabilities to deal with static knowledge, with 2) the efficient data access provided by a relational database to deal with volatile knowledge. By marking at modeling time the properties that are expected to change during the lifetime of the queries, the authors'system is able to exploit both the results of the classification process provided by a DL reasoner, and the low computational costs of a database when accessing changing data (mobile environments, semantic sensors, etc.), following a two-step continuous query processing that enables us to handle continuous DL queries efficiently. Experimental results show the feasibility of the authors' approach.