Querying XML Data using Description Logics

Abstract

Recently, ontology-based data access is more and more employed in the context of data integration. That is, to the usual data layer of an information system we superimpose a conceptual layer to be exposed to the client. In this paper, we discuss a way to query XML data over conceptual layer using Description Logics. Given a XML data file, we first map the XML DTD to a corresponding relational schema preserving the original semantics of the XML DTD, and at the meantime, we store the XML data into the relational database. After that, we create an ontology described in Description Logics with respect to the relational schema. When a Description Logic query is posted to the ontology TBox, we map it to SQL query with respect to the relational database. In this way, we can query XML data using Description Logics. The main contribution of this thesis can be seen as the following two parts: 1. We proposed a mapping from XML DTD to relational schema with constraints preserving the original XML DTD semantics. 2. We described a framework of querying XML data using Description Logics, more precisely, the DL-LiteA logic.