In ontology-based data access (OBDA), an ontology is connected to autonomous, and generally pre-existing, data repositories through mappings, so as to provide a high-level, conceptual view over such data. User queries are posed over the ontology, and answers are computed by reasoning both on the ontology and the mappings. Query answering in OBDA systems is typically performed through a query rewriting approach which is divided into two steps: (i) the query is rewritten with respect to the ontology (ontology rewriting of the query); (ii) the query thus obtained is then reformulated over the database schema using the mapping assertions (mapping rewriting of the query). In this paper we present a new approach to the optimization of query rewriting in OBDA. The key ideas of our approach are the usage of inclusion between mapping views and the usage of perfect mappings, which allow us to drastically lower the combinatorial explosion due to mapping rewriting. These ideas are formalized in PerfectMap, an algorithm for OBDA query rewriting. We have experimented PerfectMap in a real-world OBDA scenario: our experimental results clearly show that, in such a scenario, the optimizations of PerfectMap are crucial to effectively perform query answering. © 2013 ACM

Although current languages used in ontology-based data access (OBDA) systems allow for mapping source data to instances of concepts and relations in the ontology, several application domains need more flexible tools for inferring knowledge from data, which are able to dynamically acquire axioms about new concepts and relations directly from the data. In this paper we introduce the notion of mapping-based knowledge base (MKB) to formalize the situation where both the extensional and the intensional level of the ontology are determined by suitable mappings to a set of data sources. This allows for making the intensional level of the ontology as dynamic as the extensional level traditionally is. To do so, we resort to the meta-modeling capabilities of higher-order description logics, in particular the description logic Hi(DL-Lite R ), which allows seeing concepts and relations as individuals, and vice versa. The challenge in this setting is to design efficient algorithms for answering queries posed to MKBs. Besides the definition of MKBs, our main contribution is to prove that answering instance queries posed to MKBs expressed in Hi(DL-Lite R ) can be done efficiently.

In this paper we introduce the notion of mapping-based knowledge base (MKB) to formalize the situation where both the extensional and the intensional level of the ontology are determined by suitable mappings to a set of (relational) data sources. This allows for making the intensional level of the ontology as dynamic as traditionally the extensional level is. To do so, we resort to the meta-modeling capabilities of higher-order Description Logics, which allow us to see concepts and roles as individuals, and vice versa. The challenge in this setting is to design tractable query answering algorithms. Besides the definition of MKBs, our main result is that answering instance queries posed to MKBs expressed in Hi(DL-LiteR) can be done efficiently. In particular, we define a query rewriting technique that produces first-order (SQL) queries to be posed to the data sources.