Meghyn Bienvenu: Ontology-Mediated Query Answering: Using Rules and Reasoning to Get More from Data

Ontology-mediated query answering (OMQA) is a promising approach to data access and integration that has been extensively studied by the knowledge representation & reasoning and database communities. Ontologies are used to enrich and unify the vocabulary of data sources, allowing users to formulate their queries in a more familiar vocabulary which abstracts from the specific way data is stored, and to specify domain knowledge, which can be exploited by reasoning algorithms to infer implicit information and return more complete query results. While the addition of an ontology brings significant benefits, it also renders the query answering task more computationally involved. This has led both to theoretical studies aimed at understanding the complexity of OMQA for a range of ontology and query languages, as well as the development of new algorithmic techniques. The aim of this talk will be to provide a gentle introduction to OMQA, while also highlighting some recent results and research directions.

Slides