SUDOQU – Ensuring Data Quality through Ontologies

SUDOQU (enSUring Data with Ontological QUality) is a research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the objective of which is the development of techniques to ensure data quality through the use of ontologies.

Among other objectives, the SUDOQU project is developing a first-order logic reasoner, based on datalog syntax, capable of detecting whether a logical formula is finitely satisfiable or, on the contrary, unsatisfiable.

This reasoner can be used in different practical contexts such as:

• Automatic test data generation. Effectively, a developer can write a formula in the reasoner that encodes the data needed to run a test (e.g. “I need an employee who works in at least two departments”) and the reasoner is able to create all the instances needed to satisfy the formula and other business constraints (e.g., primary keys, foreign keys, and other rules definable in 1st order logic), thus ensuring quality.
• Detection of redundant/contradictory business rules. A developer can describe the business rules defined by the user, and check that there are no redundancies or contradictions with the reasoner. In this way, the rules defining data quality can be validated.
• Reasoning on OBDA. In an OBDA (ontology-based data access) system, the user describes an ontology that completes the data in a database. The reasoner, in this case, can be used both to validate the ontology and to complete the data in the database by means of ontological knowledge.