The Meaning of Erasing in RDF Under the Katsuno-Mendelzon Approach

The basic data model for the Semantic Web is RDF. In this paper the authors address updates in RDF. It is known that the semantics of updates for data models becomes unclear when the model turns, even slightly, more general than a simple relational structure. Using the framework of Katsuno-Mendelzon, they define semantics for updates in RDF. Particularly they explore the behavior of this semantics for the "Erase" operator (which in general is not expressible in RDF). Their results include a proposal of sound semantics for RDF updates, a characterization of the maximal RDF graph which captures exactly all consequences of the erase operation expressible in RDF, and complexity results about the computation of this graph and updates in RDF in general.