In this workshop-style talk I'll try to describe the differences between standard (relational) database access technology and the technology for accessing (integrated) information sources mediated by global constraints or ontologies. I will focus on the logical and computational differences between complete and incomplete information, and on the reason why the latter is intrinsic in an information integration scenario. I will present various current solutions to the problem, emphasising the advantages and the limitations of each of them, and their feasibility in a real world database applications.

Enrico Franconi

Enrico Franconi is associate professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, where he is the director of the KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data. His main research interest is on knowledge representation and reasoning technologies applied to databases - and in particular description logics, temporal representations, conceptual modelling, intelligent access to information, information integration, natural language semantics. Recently he has been involved as Principal Investigator of the European projects "SEmantic Webs and AgentS in Integrated Economies" (SeWAsIE), of the European Network of Excellence "Realizing the Semantic Web" (KnowledgeWeb), of the European Network of Excellence "Interoperability Research for Networked Enterprises Applications and Software" (InterOp), of the European basic research project "Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality" (DWQ), and he is co-investigator of the European basic research project "Thinking Ontologies" (Tones). He has been invited to give keynote talks at various conferences on Conceptual Modelling, Information Integration, and Knowledge Engineering -- most recently he gave an invited talk at the 25th ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS-2006) and at the 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER-2007).