Thesis/Internship proposal
Reasoning about ORM schemes using Racer (a Description Logic Reasoner).

Contact: Dr. Mustafa Jarrar

Description: ORM is indeed an expressive conceptual modeling language. However, ORM is mainly used for database modeling. ORM can be generalized for other application scenarios, for example, for building knowledge bases. The main issue of knowledge base systems is that it allows intelligent queries, reasoning services to know whether there are some contradictions or implications among the axioms in the knowledge base, etc. Typically, knowledge bases are used/supported by inference/reasoning engines, such as Racer.

To use ORM as a knowledge base you need to map ORM-ML (which is an XML representation of ORM schemas) into DIG (which is a description logic interface that Racer support/understand.

Students will be given a full mapping of ORM into the DLR description logic, which will be used as the bases for mapping ORM into DIG.

Research issues (only for thesis): Formalization of ORM constraints, ORM-Description logic representation.
Skills: Java, ORM-ML, DIG
See: Related proposals.