Finding commonalities between descriptions of data or knowledge is a fundamental task in Machine Learning. The formal notion characterizing precisely such commonalities is known as least general generalization of descriptions and was introduced by G. Plotkin in the early 70’s, in First Order Logic.

Identifying least general generalizations has a large scope of database applications ranging from query optimization (e.g., to share commonalities between queries in view selection or multi-query optimization) to recommendation in social networks (e.g., to establish connections between users based on their commonalities between profiles or searches).

This work that revisits the notion of least general generalizations in the entire Resource Description Framework (RDF) and popular conjunctive fragment of SPARQL, also known as Basic Graph Pattern (BGP) queries. Our contributions include the definition and the computation of least general generalizations in these two settings, which amounts to finding the largest set of commonalities between incomplete databases on the one hand and conjunctive queries on the other hand, under deductive constraints.

Members

• Sara El Hassad, Phd student
• François Goasdoué, Professor
• Hélène Jaudoin, Associate professor