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CW 457
Álvaro Cortés Calabuig, Marc Denecker, Ofer Arieli, Maurice Bruynooghe
Representation of partial knowledge and query answering in locally complete databses
Abstract
The Local Closed-World Assumption (LCWA) is a generalization of Reiter's Closed-World Assumption (CWA) for relational databases that may be incomplete. Two basic questions that are related to this assumption are: (1) how to represent the fact that only part of the information is known to be complete, and (2) how to properly reason with this information, that is: how to determine whether an answer to a database query is complete even though the database information is incomplete. In this paper we concentrate on the second issue based on a treatment of the first issue developed in earlier work of the authors. For this we consider a fixpoint semantics for declarative theories that represent locally complete databases. This semantics is based on 3-valued interpretations that allow to distinguish between the certain and possible consequences of the database's theory.
report.pdf (268K) / mailto: A. Cortés