Ontology-Based Data Access and Integration
Event details
| Date | 02.02.2009 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy |
| Location |
INM202
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Many organizations nowadays face the problem of accessing existing data sources by means of mechanisms that are sufficiently expressive without compromising efficiency. Ontologies allow one to describe the domain of interest of an information system at a high level of abstraction, and are widely considered as a suitable formal tool for sophisticated data access. In this talk we provide an overview of the problem of ontology-based data access, both from the theoretical and from the practical points of view. We address several problems that are crucial in this context: the trade-off between the expressive power of the ontology language and the efficiency of computing answers to queries; the processing of queries posed over the ontology by accessing the data stored in the sources; the impedance mismatch between the abstract objects at the ontology level and the concrete data values stored in data sources; and the integration of multiple data sources. We present solutions to these problems based on recent research results in the area of tractable Description Logics, and present the QuOnto system, implementing these solutions.
BIO
Diego Calvanese is associate professor at the KRDB Research Centre of the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where he teaches courses on theory of computing, formal languages, and information integration. His research interests include formalisms for knowledge representation and reasoning, ontology languages, Description Logics, conceptual data modeling, data integration, semistructured data management, and web service modeling and composition. He participated in several national and international research projects, and he is the coordinator of the EU STREP FET Project "Thinking ONtologiES" (TONES). He is the author of more than 150 publications in international journals, conferences, and workshops, and he is one of the editors of the "Description Logics Handbook".
D. Calvanese's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free