Linking Data to Ontologies

Antonella Poggi, Domenico Lembo, Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, and Riccardo Rosati

J. on Data Semantics. 10:133--173 2008.

One of the most interesting usages of shared conceptualizations is ontology-based data access. That is, to the usual data layer of an information system we superimpose a conceptual layer to be exported to the clients. Such a layer allows the clients to have a conceptual view of the information in the system, which abstracts away from how such information is maintained in the data layer of the system itself. While ontologies are the best candidate for realizing the conceptual layer, relational DBMSs are natural candidates for the management of the data layer. The need of efficiently processing large amounts of data requires ontologies to be expressed in a suitable ontology language, and links from data to ontologies to be specified in a suitable mapping formalism. The language should allow, on the one hand, for modeling the kind of intensional knowledge needed in real-world applications, and, on the other hand, for delegating to a relational DBMS the part of reasoning (in particular query answering) that deals with the data. The mapping formalism should appropriately deal with the impedance mismatch problem, i.e., the fact that sources store data, whereas ontologies contain objects that are instances of concepts. In this paper, we base our work on a specific ontology language satisfying the above requirement, and present a novel mapping formalism, together with a technique that, by reasoning over the ontology and the mapping, provides a sound and complete algorithm for answering queries posed to the ontology.


@article{JODS-2008,
   title = "Linking Data to Ontologies",
   year = "2008",
   author = "Antonella Poggi and Domenico Lembo and Diego Calvanese and
De Giacomo, Giuseppe and Maurizio Lenzerini and Riccardo Rosati",
   journal = "J. on Data Semantics",
   pages = "133--173",
   volume = "10",
   doi = "10.1007/978-3-540-77688-8_5",
}
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