High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies

Abstract: We propose a novel foundational framework for why-not explanations, that is, explanations for why a tuple is missing from a query result. Our why-not explanations leverage concepts from an ontology to provide high-level and meaningful reasons for why a tuple is missing from the result of a query. A key algorithmic problem in our framework is that of computing a most-general explanation for a why-not question, relative to an ontology, which can either be provided by the user, or it may be automatically derived from the data and/or schema. We study the complexity of this problem and associated problems, and present concrete algorithms for computing why-not explanations. In the case where an external ontology is provided, we first show that the problem of deciding the existence of an explanation to a why-not question is NP-complete in general. However, the problem is solvable in polynomial time for queries of bounded arity, provided that the ontology is specified in a suitable language, such as a member of the DL-Lite family of description logics, which allows for efficient concept subsumption checking. Furthermore, we show that a most-general explanation can be computed in polynomial time in this case. In addition, we propose a method for deriving a suitable (virtual) ontology from a database and/or a data workspace schema, and we present an algorithm for computing a most-general explanation to a why-not question, relative to such ontologies. This algorithm runs in polynomial-time in the case when concepts are defined in a selection-free language, or if the underlying schema is fixed. Finally, we also study the problem of computing short most-general explanations, and we briefly discuss alternative definitions of what it means to be an explanation, and to be most general.