Tractable Reasoning and Efficient Query Answering in Description Logics

The current trend for building an ontology-based data management system (DMS) is to capitalize on efforts made to design a preexisting well-established DMS (a reference system). The method amounts to extracting from the reference DMS a piece of schema relevant to the new application needs—a module—, possibly personalizing it with extra constraints w.r.t. the application under construction, and then managing a data set using the resulting schema. In this paper, we extend the existing definitions of modules and we introduce novel properties of robustness that provide means for checking easily that a robust module-based DMS evolves safely w.r.t. both the schema and the data of the reference DMS. From a practical viewpoint, this means that a module robust to query answering should also be robust to consistency checking, so that global consistency can be effectively checked by a module-based DMS