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Mastro studio: managing ontology-based data access applications

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is a novel paradigm for accessing large data repositories through an ontology, that is a formal description of a domain of interest. Supporting the management of OBDA applications poses new challenges, as it requires to provide effective tools for (i) allowing both expert and non-expert users to analyze the OBDA specification, (ii) collaboratively documenting the ontology, (iii) exploiting OBDA services, such as query answering and automated reasoning over ontologies, e.g., to support data quality check, and (iv) tuning the OBDA application towards optimized performances. To fulfill these challenges, we have built a novel system, called MASTRO STUDIO, based on a tool for automated reasoning over ontologies, enhanced with a suite of tools and optimization facilities for managing OBDA applications. To show the effectiveness of MASTRO STUDIO, we demonstrate its usage in one OBDA application developed in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Effective Computation of Maximal Sound Approximations of Description Logic Ontologies

We study the problem of approximating Description Logic (DL) ontologies specified in a source language

On Querying Incomplete Information in Databases under Bag Semantics

\mathcal{L}_S

From OWL to DL − Lite through efficient ontology approximation

in terms of a less expressive target language

Reducing global consistency to local consistency in Ontology-based data access

\mathcal{L}_T

Optique 1.0: semantic access to big data: the case of Norwegian petroleum directorate's factpages

. This problem is getting very relevant in practice: e.g., approximation is often needed in ontology-based data access systems, which are able to deal with ontology languages of a limited expressiveness. We first provide a general, parametric, and semantically well-founded definition of maximal sound approximation of a DL ontology. Then, we present an algorithm that is able to effectively compute two different notions of maximal sound approximation according to the above parametric semantics when the source ontology language is OWL 2 and the target ontology language is OWL 2 QL. Finally, we experiment the above algorithm by computing the two OWL 2 QL approximations of a large set of existing OWL 2 ontologies. The experimental results allow us both to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed notions of approximation and to compare the two different notions of approximation in real cases.

Data quality in ontology-based data access: the case of consistency

Querying incomplete data is an important task both in data management, and in many AI applications that use query rewriting to take advantage of relational database technology. Usually one looks for answers that are certain, i.e., true in every possible world represented by an incomplete database. For positive queries – expressed either in positive relational algebra or as unions of conjunctive queries – finding such answers can be done efficiently when databases and query answers are sets. Real-life databases however use bag, rather than set, semantics. For bags, instead of saying that a tuple is certainly in the answer, we have more detailed information: namely, the range of the numbers of occurrences of the tuple in query answers. We show that the behavior of positive queries is different under bag semantics: finding the minimum number of occurrences can still be done efficiently, but for maximum it becomes intractable. We use these results to investigate approximation schemes for computing certain answers to arbitrary first-order queries that have been proposed for set semantics. One of them cannot be adapted to bags, as it relies on the intractable maxima of occurrences, but another scheme only deals with minima, and we show how to adapt it to bag semantics without losing efficiency.

Graphol: Ontology Representation through Diagrams

Ontologies provide a conceptualization of a domain of interest which can be used for different objectives, such as for providing a formal description of the domain of interest for documentation purposes, or for providing a mechanism for reasoning upon the domain. For instance, they are the core element of the Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) [3,8] paradigm, in which the ontology is utilized as a conceptual view, allowing user access to the underlying data sources. With the aim to use an ontology as a formal description of the domain of interest, the use of expressive languages proves to be useful. If instead the goal is to use the ontology for reasoning tasks which require low computational complexity, the high expressivity of the language used to model the ontology may be a hindrance. In this scenario, the approximation of ontologies expressed in very expressive languages through ontologies expressed in languages which keep the computational complexity of the reasoning tasks low is pivotal.

On separability of ontological constraints

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is a new paradigm aiming at accessing and managing data by means of an ontology, i.e., a conceptual representation of the domain of interest in the underlying information system. In the last years, this new paradigm has been used for providing users with suitable mechanisms for querying the data residing at the information system sources. Most of the research has been concentrating on making query answering efficient. However, query answering is not the only service that an OBDA system must provide. Another crucial service is consistency checking. Current approaches to this problem involves executing expensive queries at run-time. In this paper we address a fundamental problem for OBDA system: given an OBDA specification, can we avoid the consistency check on the whole OBDA system (global consistency check), and rely instead on the constraint checking carried out by the DBMS on the data source (local consistency checking)? We present algorithms and complexity analysis for this problem, showing that it can be solved efficiently for a class of OBDA systems that is very relevant in practice.