Updating DL-Lite ontologies through first-order queries

In this paper we study instance-level update in DL-LiteA, the description logic underlying the OWL 2 QL standard. In particular we focus on formula-based approaches to ABox insertion and deletion. We show that DL-LiteA, which is well-known for enjoying first-order rewritability of query answering, enjoys a first-order rewritability property also for updates. That is, every update can be reformulated into a set of insertion and deletion instructions computable through a nonrecursive datalog program. Such a program is readily translatable into a first-order query over the ABox considered as a database, and hence into SQL. By exploiting this result, we implement an update component for DLLiteA-based systems and perform some experiments showing that the approach works in practice.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Using Ontologies for Semantic Data Integration

While big data analytics is considered as one of the most important paths to competitive advantage of today’s enterprises, data scientists spend a comparatively large amount of time in the data preparation and data integration phase of a big data project. This shows that data integration is still a major challenge in IT applications. Over the past two decades, the idea of using semantics for data integration has become increasingly crucial, and has received much attention in the AI, database, web, and data mining communities. Here, we focus on a specific paradigm for semantic data integration, called Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of OBDA, pointing out both the techniques that are at the basis of the paradigm, and the main challenges that remain to be addressed

A Comprehensive Framework for Controlled Query Evaluation, Consistent Query Answering and KB Updates in Description Logics

In this extended abstract we discuss the relationship between confidentiality-preserving frameworks and inconsistency-tolerant repair and update semantics in Description Logics (DL). In particular, we consider the well-known problems of Consistent Query Answering, Controlled Query Evaluation, and Knowledge Base Update in DL and introduce a unifying framework that can be naturally instantiated to capture significant settings for the above problems, previously investigated in the literature

Inconsistency-tolerant Query Answering in Ontology-based Data Access

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is receiving great attention as a new paradigm for managing information systems through semantic technologies. According to this paradigm, a Description Logic ontology provides an abstract and formal representation of the domain of interest to the information system, and is used as a sophisticated schema for accessing the data and formulating queries over them. In this paper, we address the problem of dealing with inconsistencies in OBDA. Our general goal is both to study DL semantical frameworks that are inconsistency-tolerant, and to devise techniques for answering unions of conjunctive queries under such inconsistency-tolerant semantics. Our work is inspired by the approaches to consistent query answering in databases, which are based on the idea of living with inconsistencies in the database, but trying to obtain only consistent information during query answering, by relying on the notion of database repair. We first adapt the notion of database repair to our context, and show that, according to such a notion, inconsistency-tolerant query answering is intractable, even for very simple DLs. Therefore, we propose a different repair-based semantics, with the goal of reaching a good compromise between the expressive power of the semantics and the computational complexity of inconsistency-tolerant query answering. Indeed, we show that query answering under the new semantics is first-order rewritable in OBDA, even if the ontology is expressed in one of the most expressive members of the DL-Lite family

Desing and Validation of a Light Inference System to Support Embedded Context Reasoning

Embedded context management in resource-constrained devices (e.g. mobile phones, autonomous sensors or smart objects) imposes special requirements in terms of lightness for data modelling and reasoning. In this paper, we explore the state-of-the-art on data representation and reasoning tools for embedded mobile reasoning and propose a light inference system (LIS) aiming at simplifying embedded inference processes offering a set of functionalities to avoid redundancy in context management operations. The system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework, conceived to facilitate the creation of context-aware applications—it decouples sensor data acquisition and context processing from the application logic. LIS, composed of several modules, encapsulates existing lightweight tools for ontology data management and rule-based reasoning, and it is ready to run on Java-enabled handheld devices. Data management and reasoning processes are designed to handle a general ontology that enables communication among framework components. Both the applications running on top of the framework and the framework components themselves can configure the rule and query sets in order to retrieve the information they need from LIS. In order to test LIS features in a real application scenario, an ‘Activity Monitor’ has been designed and implemented: a personal health-persuasive application that provides feedback on the user’s lifestyle, combining data from physical and virtual sensors. In this case of use, LIS is used to timely evaluate the user’s activity level, to decide on the convenience of triggering notifications and to determine the best interface or channel to deliver these context-aware alerts.

Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

Dealing with Inconsistencies and Updates in Description Logic Knowledge Bases

The main purpose of an "Ontology-based Information System" (OIS) is to provide an explicit description of the domain of interest, called ontology, and let all the functions of the system be based on such representation, thus freeing the users from the knowledge about the physical repositories where the real data reside. The functionalities that an OIS should provide to the user include both query answering, whose goal is to extract information from the system, and update, whose goal is to modify the information content of the system in order to reflect changes in the domain of interest. The "ontology" is a formal, high quality intentional representation of the domain, designed in such a way to avoid inconsistencies in the modeling of concepts and relationships. On the contrary, the extensional level of the system, constituted by a set of autonomous, heterogeneous data sources, is built independently from the conceptualization represented by the ontology, and therefore may contain information that is incoherent with the ontology itself. This dissertation presents a detailed study on the problem of dealing with inconsistencies in OISs, both in query answering, and in performing updates. We concentrate on the case where the knowledge base in the OISs is expressed in Description Logics, especially the logics of the DL-lite family. As for query answering, we propose both semantical frameworks that are inconsistency-tolerant, and techniques for answering unions of conjunctive queries posed to OISs under such inconsistency-tolerant semantics. As for updates, we present an approach to compute the result of updating a possibly inconsistent OIS with both insertion and deletion of extensional knowledge