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Effective Query Answering with Ontologies and DBoxes

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Description Logic, Theory Combination, and All That

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11560))

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to survey the formalisation of a precise and uniform integration between first-order ontologies, first-order queries, and classical relational databases (DBoxes) We include here non-standard variants of first-order logic, such as the one with active domain semantics and standard name assumption, used typically in database theory. We present a general framework for the rewriting of a domain independent first-order query in presence of an arbitrary domain independent first-order logic ontology over a signature extending a database signature with additional predicates. The framework supports deciding the existence of a logically equivalent and – given the ontology – safe-range first-order reformulation (called exact reformulation) of a domain independent first-order query in terms of the database signature, and if such a reformulation exists, it provides an effective approach to construct the reformulation based on interpolation using standard theorem proving techniques (i.e., tableau). Since the reformulation is a safe-range formula, it is effectively executable as an SQL query. We finally present an application of the framework with the very expressive \(\mathcal {ALCHOI}\) and \(\mathcal {SHOQ}\) description logics ontologies, by providing effective means to compute safe-range first-order exact reformulations of queries.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Enrico Franconi & Volha Kerhet

Authors
  1. Enrico Franconi
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  2. Volha Kerhet
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Correspondence to Enrico Franconi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Carsten Lutz

  2. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Uli Sattler

  3. University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Cesare Tinelli

  4. TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Anni-Yasmin Turhan

  5. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Frank Wolter

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Franconi, E., Kerhet, V. (2019). Effective Query Answering with Ontologies and DBoxes. In: Lutz, C., Sattler, U., Tinelli, C., Turhan, AY., Wolter, F. (eds) Description Logic, Theory Combination, and All That. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22102-7_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22102-7_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22102-7

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