Information Integration and Reasoning under Expressive Constraints

15^th October 2013, 16:00 Ashton Lecture Theater
Dr. Andre Hernich
Dept of Computer Science
University of Liverpool

Abstract

There is a fruitful interaction between information integration and
reasoning over (database or description logic) constraints. Information
integration is the problem of combining data from several sources into
a single database, called the global database, providing users with
a unified view on the data sources. It comes in two flavours, one where
the global database has to be materialized, and one where the global
database is merely virtual. Recent approaches model the mapping from
the data sources to the global database by a set of constraints on the
possible global databases. Answering a query on the global database thus
amounts to checking if the query is entailed by the source data and
the constraints.

In this talk, I'll give a short overview on recent approaches to solve
the entailment problem efficiently for "practically" relevant classes
of constraints and queries.