Query-Answering CG Knowledge Bases

Conceptual graphs are a good choice for constructing and exploiting a knowledge base. In several of our projects (semantic portal for e-tourism, exploitation of digital object corpus, etc.), we have to query such bases. So it is natural to consider queries and bases as simple graphs and to compute the set of all projections from a query to a base. However, there is a problem of the return of this set of projections to the user. More generally, the main issue is about the definition of the notion of answers in an query-answering system made of knowledge bases formalized by graphs (Conceptual Graphs, RDF (Resource Description Framework) , Topic Maps, etc.). In this paper, we study several notions of answers and some of their characterizations. We distinguish between notions of answers by subgraphs of the base and answers by creation of result graphs. For the last type of answers, we define completeness, non-redundancy and minimality criteria of the answer sets and propose several notions of answers w.r.t these criteria.