Asking and Answering Queries Semantically

In this paper we propose a new method, called SEMQUERY, for querying information sources whose data are organized according to different schemata. The method is based on the idea of semantic elicitation, namely a process which takes in input the structural part of a query (e.g. the XPath part of an XQuery) and returns an expression in a logical language which represent the meaning of the query in a form which ideally is independent from its original syntactic formulation. Since the same process of elicitation can be performed on any path of schemata used to organize data, the decision on whether there is any logical relation between a query and a path in the schema is made via logical reasoning.