The Combined Approach to Ontology-Based Data Access

The use of ontologies for accessing data is one of the most exciting new applications of description logic in databases and other information systems. A realistic way of realising sufficiently scalable ontology- based data access in practice is by reduction to querying relational databases. In this paper, we describe the ‘combined approach,’ which incorporates the information given by the ontology into the data and employs query rewriting to eliminate spurious answers. We illustrate this approach for ontologies given in the DL-Lite family of description logics and briefly discuss the results obtained for the EL family.