Fitting Ontologies and Constraints to Relational Structures

Abstract

We study the problem of fitting ontologies and constraints to positive and negative examples that take the form of a finite relational structure. As ontology and constraint languages, we consider the description logics $\mathcal{E}\mathcal{L}$ and $\mathcal{E}\mathcal{L}\mathcal{I}$ as well as several classes of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs): full, guarded, frontier-guarded, frontier-one, and unrestricted TGDs as well as inclusion dependencies. We pinpoint the exact computational complexity, design algorithms, and analyze the size of fitting ontologies and TGDs. We also investigate the related problem of constructing a finite basis of concept inclusions / TGDs for a given set of finite structures. While finite bases exist for $\mathcal{E}\mathcal{L}$, $\mathcal{E}\mathcal{L}\mathcal{I}$, guarded TGDs, and inclusion dependencies, they in general do not exist for full, frontier-guarded and frontier-one TGDs.

Accepted at the 22nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2025)