An Existential Rule Framework for Computing Why-Provenance On-Demand for Datalog

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Why-provenance—explaining why a query result is obtained—is an essential asset for reaching the goal of Explainable AI. For instance, recursive (Datalog) queries may show unexpected derivations due to complex entanglement of database atoms inside recursive rule applications. Provenance, and why-provenance in particular, helps debugging rule sets to eventually obtain the desired set of rules. There are three kinds of approaches to computing why-provenance for Datalog in the literature: (1) the complete ones, (2) the approximate ones, and (3) the theoretical ones. What all these approaches have in common is that they aim at computing provenance for all IDB atoms, while only a few atoms might be requested to be explained. We contribute an on-demand approach: After deriving all entailed facts of a Datalog program, we allow for querying for the provenance of particular IDB atoms and the structures involved in deriving provenance are computed only then. Our framework is based on terminating existential rules, recording the different rule applications. We present two implementations of the framework, one based on the semiring solver FPsolve, the other one based Datalog(S), a recent extension of Datalog by set terms. We perform experiments on benchmark rule sets using both implementations and discuss feasibility of provenance on-demand.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRules and Reasoning
EditorsGuido Governatori, Anni-Yasmin Turhan
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media B.V.
Pages146-163
Number of pages18
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-21541-4
ISBN (print)978-3-031-21540-7
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13752 LNCS
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

Title6th International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning, RuleML+RR 2022
Duration26 - 28 September 2022
CityVirtual, Online

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-3293-2940/work/160047747

Keywords

Keywords

  • Datalog provenance, Datalog(S), Why-provenance