Recovering Explanations from Transformed Rule-Based Ontologies
Alex Ivliev, Markus Krötzsch, Maximilian Marx
Abstract
Datalog rules are often used to define ontologies over Knowledge Graphs. Rule reasoners routinely optimise such ontologies by rewriting their rules into a form that can be evaluated more efficiently. These transformations preserve the entailed facts, but not the structure of the underlying derivations. A proof tree under the rewritten rules explains why a fact holds, but does not readily yield an explanation in terms of the original rules. We study the problem of constructing, from a proof of entailment under the rewritten rules, a proof under the original ones: we establish its computational complexity and identify two practically relevant languages for specifying proof transformations.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.