Updating RDFS: from Theory to Practice

There is a comprehensive body of theory studying updates and schema evolution of knowledge bases, ontologies, and in particular of RDFS. In this paper we turn these ideas into practice by presenting a feasible and practical procedure for updating RDFS. Along the lines of ontology evolution, we treat schema and instance updates separately, showing that RDFS instance updates are not only feasible, but also deterministic. For RDFS schema update, known to be intractable in the general abstract case, we show that it becomes feasible in real world datasets. We present for both, instance and schema update, simple and feasible algorithms.