Wikidata Constraints on MARS (Extended Technical Report)

Wikidata constraints, albeit useful, are represented and processed in an incomplete, ad hoc fashion. Constraint declarations do not fully express their meaning, and thus do not provide a precise, unambiguous basis for constraint specification, or a logical foundation for constraint-checking implementations. In prior work we have proposed a logical framework for Wikidata as a whole, based on multi-attributed relational structures (MARS) and related logical languages. In this paper we explain how constraints are handled in the proposed framework, and show that nearly all of Wikidata's existing property constraints can be completely characterized in it, in a natural and economical fashion. We also give characterizations for several proposed property constraints, and show that a variety of non-property constraints can be handled in the same framework.

Wikidata on MARS

Multi-attributed relational structures (MARSs) have been proposed as a formal data model for generalized property graphs, along with multi-attributed rule-based predicate logic (MARPL) as a useful rule-based logic in which to write inference rules over property graphs. Wikidata can be modelled in an extended MARS that adds the (imprecise) datatypes of Wikidata. The rules of inference for the Wikidata ontology can be modelled as a MARPL ontology, with extensions to handle the Wikidata datatypes and functions over these datatypes. Because many Wikidata qualifiers should participate in most inference rules in Wikidata a method of implicitly handling qualifier values on a per-qualifier basis is needed to make this modelling useful. The meaning of Wikidata is then the extended MARS that is the closure of running these rules on the Wikidata data model. Wikidata constraints can be modelled as multi-attributed predicate logic (MAPL) formulae, again extended with datatypes, that are evaluated over this extended MARS. The result models Wikidata in a way that fixes several of its major problems.

ASHACL: Alternative Shapes Constraint Language

ASHACL, a variant of the W3C Shapes Constraint Language, is designed to determine whether an RDF graph meets some conditions. These conditions are grouped into shapes, which validate whether particular RDF terms each meet the constraints of the shape. Shapes are themselves expressed as RDF triples in an RDF graph, called a shapes graph.

Using Description Logics for RDF Constraint Checking and Closed-World Recognition

RDF and Description Logics work in an open-world setting where absence of information is not information about absence. Nevertheless, Description Logic axioms can be interpreted in a closed-world setting and in this setting they can be used for both constraint checking and closed-world recognition against information sources. When the information sources are expressed in well-behaved RDF or RDFS (i.e., RDF graphs interpreted in the RDF or RDFS semantics) this constraint checking and closed-world recognition is simple to describe. Further this constraint checking can be implemented as SPARQL querying and thus effectively performed.