cs.LOJul 31, 2026

Recovering Explanations from Transformed Rule-Based Ontologies

Authors: Alex IvlievMarkus KrötzschMaximilian Marx

Organizations: Knowledge-Based Systems Group, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

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.

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