Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

We study the problem of associating formal semantic descriptions to data services. We base our proposal on the Ontology-Based Data Access paradigm, where a domain ontology is used to provide a semantic layer mapped to the data sources of an organization. The basic idea is to explain the semantics of a data service in terms of a query over the ontology. We illustrate a formal framework for this problem, based on the notion of source-to-ontology rewriting, which comes in three variants, called sound, complete and perfect, respectively. We present a thorough complexity analysis of two computational problems, namely verification (checking whether a query is a rewriting of a given data service), and computation (computing a rewriting of a data service).