Instance-Level Update in DL-Lite Ontologies through First-Order Rewriting

In this paper we study instance-level update in DL-LiteA, a well-known description logic that influenced the OWL 2 QL standard. Instance-level update regards insertions and deletions in the ABox of an ontology. In particular, we focus on formula-based approaches to instance-level update. We show that DL-LiteA, which is well-known for enjoying firstorder rewritability of query answering, enjoys a first-order rewritability property also for instance-level update. That is, every update can be reformulated into a set of insertion and deletion instructions computable through a non-recursive Datalog program with negation. Such a program is readily translatable into a first-order query over the ABox considered as a database, and hence into SQL. By exploiting this result, we implement an update component for DL-LiteA-based systems and perform some experiments showing that the approach works in practice.