Towards efficient and practical solutions for ontology-based data management

This paper presents the research summary of my Ph.D. plan, which is currently in the early stages of its development. The objectives around which my work is focusing and that I will continue to pursue throughout the remainder of my doctoral activities are the development of tools and the definition of a methodology for the execution of those tasks that are typically performed when working with ontologies in the context of Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). The objective of this methodology is to guide the ontology engineer through ontology design, representation and approximation, and the issues I will address in order to provide the necessary tools to achieve this goal are the optimization of ontology classification in DL-Lite, the definition of a graphical language tailored towards ontologies, and the study of approximation of ontologies in expressive languages into DL-Lite logics. Such methodology proves to be necessary when facing the numerous challenges that often arise in real-world scenarios, in which the amount of data that is managed by information systems, and the processes that manage and act on this data grow continuously. © 2013 ACM.