Terminological Reasoning by Query Evaluation: A Formal Mapping of a Terminological Logic to an Object Data Model

The paper starts by giving concise introductions into the terminological logic FRM and the object data model COCOON. It then brieey outlines a semantic-preserving mapping from FRM class descriptions to COCOON types and classes and shows how the terminological inference of classiica-tion is mapped to a set of equivalent COCOON queries. Since these queries can (mostly) be submitted as a whole to the underlying database system we can take full advantage of all the results on query op-timisation, on providing eecient physical access structures, as well as on parallelisa-tion that are available in the database area to make terminological inferences more ef-cient. This will play a crucial role in re-alising knowledge base systems capable of dealing with very large knowledge bases.