Ontology-Based Governance of Data-Aware Processes

Abstract. In this paper we show how one can use the technology developed re-cently for Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) to govern data-aware processes through ontologies. In particular, we consider processes executed over a relational database which issue calls to external services to acquire new information and up-date the data. We equip these processes with an OBDA system, in which an ontol-ogy modeling the domain of interest is connected through declarative mappings to the database, and that consequently allows one to understand and govern the manipulated information at the conceptual level. In this setting, we are interested in verifying first-order μ-calculus formulae specifying temporal properties over the evolution of the information at the conceptual level. Specifically, we show how, building on first-order rewritability of queries over the system state that is typical of OBDA, we are able to reformulate the temporal properties into tem-poral properties expressed over the underlying database. This allows us to adopt notable decidability results on verification of evolving databases that have been established recently.