Diego Calvanese
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Ontologies allow one to describe the domain of interest of an information system at a high level of abstraction.

Abstract
Ontologies allow one to describe the domain of interest of an information system at a high level of abstraction. They provide mechanisms both for representing constraints holding in the underlying data and for performing automated inference over data and constraints in support of data management tasks. Ontology-based Data Access (OBDA) is a novel paradigm concerned with providing access to one or more data sources through a mediating ontology, which has gained increased attention in recent years both from the knowledge representation and from the database communities. In this talk we discuss the opportunities and challenges provided by the use of lightweight ontology languages in OBDA, concentrating on the challenging task of efficiently processing queries over the ontology by accessing the underlying data sources.

We discuss the approaches based on rewriting queries with respect to both the ontology and the mappings to the data sources, and present recent results on optimizing the performance of OBDA systems towards their deployment in real world settings.

Biography
Diego Calvanese is an associate professor at the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on knowledge bases and databases, ontologies, theory of computing, and formal languages. His research interests include formalisms for knowledge representation and reasoning, ontology languages, description logics, Semantic Web, conceptual data modeling, data integration, semistructured data management, data-aware process verification, and service modeling and synthesis.

He is actively involved in several national and international research projects in the above areas, and he is the author of more than 200 refereed publications, including ones in the most prestigious international journals and conferences in Databases and Artificial Intelligence. He is one of the editors of the Description Logic Handbook.

Currently, he is a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Vienna as Pauli Fellow of the "Wolfgang Pauli Institute".