========My review for Zhou et al. SSKI08 Submission======================
"Integrating Relational Databases with Semantic Web Ontologies:
Reasoning and Query Answering using Views"
Technical Quality: Weak Reject
Presentation: Weak Accept
Significance and Originality: Weak Reject
OVERALL RATING: Weak Reject
Confidence in your review: High
This paper adopts the local-as-view (LAV) idea to integrate relational databases with
Semantic Web ontologies. To do that, the authors choose Semantic Web ontologies as
global schemas and define the local databases as views based on OWL ontologies. The
authors also adopt a query rewriting algorithm which is similar to "bucket" and "inverrule" algorithms in view-based data integration research.
Strengths:
It is an important research topic for the Semantic Web to query and integrate relational
databases. The paper proposes a LAV like approach to attack this problem. It may be an
implementation choice for scientific data sharing in some scenarios.
Weaknesses:
This paper makes little contribution to this research topic. The authors claim that one of
their contributions is the consideration of constraint mappings between databases and
OWL (DL). They obviously neglected the important reference of this topic:
Boris Motik, Ian Horrocks, Ulrike Sattler: Bridging the gap between OWL and relational
databases. WWW 2007: 807-816
The authors also claim that they leverage constraint mappings in their LAV like query
rewriting system. However, their running example and query rewriting algorithm did not
show how to use those constraint mappings (axioms): how a view based query rewriting
algorithm can incorporate a reasoning process with those constraint axioms?
The authors seems do not fully understand the difficulty of query rewriting in the LAV
data integration. It is important to prove the correctness of their algorithm (Algorithm 2):
why the rewritten queries based their algorithm can provide correct answers for the initial
ontology(global)-based query. The reviewer suggests the authors check the "sound view"
discussion in the following paper:
Maurizio Lenzerini: Data Integration: A Theoretical Perspective. PODS 2002: 233-246
The references have some format problems: some co-authors' names have not been
correctly displayed. Some information, such as conference year and journal volume, are
missing.