Ricerc@Sapienza

The issue of cooperation, integration, and coordination between information peers has been addressed over the years both in the context of the Semantic Web and in several other networked environments, including data integration, Peer-to-Peer and Grid computing, service-oriented computing, distributed agent systems, and collaborative data sharing. One of the main problems arising in such contexts is how to exploit the mappings between peers in order to answer queries posed to one peer.

We study the problem of designing reverse engineering techniques for associating semantic descriptions to existing data services. We base our proposal on the Ontology-Based Data Access paradigm, where a domain ontology is used to provide a semantic layer mapped to the data sources of an organization. The basic idea is to perform the reverse engineering of a data service, expressed a query over the data sources, by deriving a query over the ontology that explains the semantics of the data service in terms of the element of the ontology.