Ontology-Mediated Query Answering

Meghyn Bienvenu


Course Summary | About the lecturer | Location and schedule | Materials | Videos | Assignment

Slides

Tuesday: part 1 part 2
Wednesday: slides
Thursday: slides

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Course summary:

Ontology-mediated query answering (OMQA) is a promising approach to data access and integration that has been extensively studied by the AI and database communities. Ontologies, which are typically specified using logic-based formalisms, serve both to provide a user-friendly vocabulary for query formulation and to capture domain knowledge, which can be exploited by reasoning algorithms to infer implicit information and return more complete query results. While the addition of an ontology brings significant benefits, it also renders the query answering task more computationally involved, which has led both to theoretical studies aimed at understanding the complexity of OMQA for a range of ontology and query languages, as well as to the development of new algorithmic techniques. This course will provide an introduction to OMQA, focusing on ontologies specified using description logics. We will give an overview of the complexity landscape and present two central algorithmic paradigms, namely, query rewriting and materialization. The final part of the course will survey some more recent results aimed at better understanding the limits and possibilities of these techniques.

About the lecturer:

Meghyn Bienvenu is a CNRS research director at LaBRI (Bordeaux, France). Her research interests span a range of topics in knowledge representation and reasoning and database theory, with a main focus on description logic ontologies and their use in querying data. She currently leads an ANR AI Chair on the topic of intelligent handling of imperfect data. She is a member of the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL), and PC co-chair of KR 2021, the leading conference on knowledge representation and reasoning. Her research has been recognized by an invited Early Career Spotlight talk at IJCAI’16 and the 2016 CNRS Bronze Medal in the area of computer science.

Tuesday, March 29th in 2180
14:15 - 15:45 lecture
16:15 - 17:15 class
Wednesday, March 30th in 5440
14:15 - 15:45 lecture
16:15 - 17:15 class
Thursday, March 31st in 5440
14:15 - 15:45 lecture
16:15 - 17:15 class

Materials


Assignment: assignment. Due: May 29th 2022.