Representing and Querying Norm States Using Temporal Ontology-Based Data Access

The prominent role of normative primitives for regulating interactions in enterprise systems makes their representation and inspection a crucial task. In particular, querying the states of norms is essential to assess the accountability and compliance of interacting parties, as well as to reconstruct the historical evolution of their mutual contractual relationships. The main issue, however, is that the temporal data stored during the operation of the enterprise system are typically at a low level of abstraction, and do not directly refer to norms and their states. To overcome this problem, we propose the QUEN framework for querying norm states on top of legacy relational databases. QUEN builds on the temporal extension of the well-established framework of Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) to semantically represent normative primitives and their temporal states, and to map them to the underlying legacy data. The distinctive feature of QUEN is that mappings are not arbitrarily expressed by the modeler, but are instead automatically synthesized starting from a specification that explicitly indicates how the constitutive components of a normative primitive, as well as its lifecycle, can be reconstructed from the legacy data.