DLp: a description logic for extracting and managing complex terminological and structural properties from database schemes

This paper presents a number of techniques by which useful properties holdi ng among objects belonging to a set of input database schemes can be automa tically 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 deriv ing semantic scheme substructures, defined as complex expressions of our de scriptive language. It is shown that the availability of such derived prope rties can be advantageous in various application contexts, including federa ted database integration, query optimization and view maintenance. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.