DLP: A description logic for extracting and managing complex terminological and structural properties from database schemes

摘要

This paper presents a number of techniques by which useful properties holding among objects belonging to a set of input database schemes can be automatically derived. The approach uses a particular Description Logic enriched with plausibility factors to represent and reason about scheme properties. Our method comprises algorithms for selecting relevant subschemes and deriving semantic scheme substructures, defined as complex expressions of our descriptive language. It is shown that the availability of such derived properties can be advantageous in various application contexts, including federated database integration, query optimization and view maintenance.