Section: Scientific Foundations

Ontology-based Data and Document Management

Ontology-based data management basically aims at enabling usual database management tasks in the presence of ontological constraints (which are typically specificied using description logics). We are currently studying problems related to query answering in the presence of ontologies formulated in lightweight descriptions logics. We focus mainly on the DL-lite family of description logics, which provides the foundations of the OWL2 profile QL, the W3C recommendation for managing large datasets.

Linking data initiatives aim at publishing more and more RDF data sets on the Web and setting RDF links between data items of different sources. Nevertheless, the Web remains concentrated on the interchange of more or less structured documents. Semantic annotation consists in assigning to a document or to its parts a metadata whose semantics is defined in an ontology. We are investigating ontology-based automatic document annotation approaches and we develop query engines that can be used in this setting.