Description Logics for Information Integration

Information integration is the problem of combining the data residing at different, heterogeneous sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data, called mediated schema. The mediated schema is therefore a reconciled view of the information, which can be queried by the user. It is the task of the system to free the user from the knowledge on where data are, and how data are structured at the sources. In this chapter, we discuss data integration in general, and describe a logic-based approach to data integration. A logic of the Description Logics family is used to model the information managed by the integration system, to formulate queries posed to the system, and to perform several types of automated reasoning supporting both the modeling, and the query answering process. We focus, in particular, on a specific Description Logic, called DLR, specifically designed for database applications. In the chapter, we illustrate how DLR is used to model a mediated schema of an integration system, to specify the semantics of the data sources, and finally to support the query answering process by means of the associated reasoning methods.