The digital transformation of different processes and the resulting availability of vast amounts of data describing people and their behaviors offer significant promise to advance multiple research areas and enhance both the public and private sectors. Exploiting the full potential of this vision requires a unified representation of different autonomous data sources to facilitate detailed data analysis capacity. Collecting and processing sensitive data about individuals leads to consideration of privacy requirements and confidentiality concerns. This vision paper provides a concise overview of the research field concerning Privacy-Preserving Data Integration (PPDI), the associated challenges, opportunities, and unexplored aspects, with the primary aim of designing a novel and comprehensive PPDI framework based on a Trusted Third-Party microservices architecture.

We present SparkER, an ER tool that can scale practitioners' favorite ER algorithms.SparkER has been devised to take full advantage of parallel and distributed computation as well (running on top of Apache Spark).The first SparkER version was focused on the blocking step and implements both schema-agnostic and Blast meta-blocking approaches (i.e. the state-of-the-art ones); a GUI for SparkER, to let non-expert users to use it in an unsupervised mode, was developed.The new version of SparkER to be shown in this demo, extends significantly the tool.Entity matching and Entity Clustering modules have been added.Moreover, in addition to the completely unsupervised mode of the first version, a supervised mode has been added.The user can be assisted in supervising the entire process and in injecting his knowledge in order to achieve the best result.During the demonstration, attendees will be shown how SparkER can significantly help in devising and debugging ER algorithms.

The Open Data \textit{philosophy} is based on the idea that certain data should be made ​​available to all citizens, in an open form, without any copyright restrictions, patents or other mechanisms of control. Various government have started to publish open data, first of all USA and UK in 2009, and in 2015, the Open Data Barometer project (www.opendatabarometer.org) states that on 77 diverse states across the world, over 55 percent have developed some form of Open Government Data initiative. We claim Public Administrations, that are the main producers and one of the consumers of Open Data, might effectively extract important information by integrating its own data with open data sources.This paper reports the activities carried on during a one-year research project on Open Data for Youth Policies. The project was mainly devoted to explore the youth situation in the municipalities and provinces of the Emilia Romagna region (Italy), in particular, to examine data on population, education and work.The project goals were: to identify interesting data sources both from the open data community and from the private repositories of local governments of Emilia Romagna region related to the Youth Policies; to integrate them and, to show up the result of the integration by means of a useful navigator tool; in the end, to publish new information on the web as Linked Open Data. This paper also reports the main issues encountered that may seriously affect the entire process of consumption, integration till the publication of open data.

Semantic query optimization uses semantic knowledge (i.e., integrity constraints) to transform a query into an equivalent one that may be answered more efficiently. This article proposes a general method for semantic query optimization in the framework of Object-Oriented Database Systems. The method is effective for a large class of queries, including conjunctive recursive queries expressed with regular path expressions and is based on three ingredients. The first is a Description Logic, ODL RE , providing a type system capable of expressing: class descriptions, queries, views, integrity constraint rules and inference techniques, such as incoherence detection and subsumption computation. The second is a semantic expansion function for queries, which incorporates restrictions logically implied by the query and the schema (classes + rules) in one query. The third is an optimal rewriting method of a query with respect to the schema classes that rewrites a query into an equivalent one, by determining more specialized classes to be accessed and by reducing the number of factors. We implemented the method in a tool providing an ODMG-compliant interface that allows a full interaction with OQL queries, wrapping underlying Description Logic representation and techniques to the user.

Integrity constraints are rules that should guarantee the integrity of a database. Provided an adequate mechanism to express them is available, the following question arises: is there any way to populate a database which satisfies the constraints supplied by a database designer? That is, does the database schema, including constraints, admit at least a nonempty model? This work answers the above question in a complex object database environment, providing a theoretical framework, including the following ingredients: (1) two alternative formalisms, able to express a relevant set of state integrity constraints with a declarative style; (2) two specialized reasoners, based on the tableaux calculus, able to check the consistency of complex objects database schemata expressed with the two formalisms. The proposed formalisms share a common kernel, which supports complex objects and object identifiers, and which allow the expression of acyclic descriptions of: classes, nested relations and views, built up by means of the recursive use of record, quantified set, and object type constructors and by the intersection, union, and complement operators. Furthermore, the kernel formalism allows the declarative formulation of typing constraints and integrity rules. In order to improve the expressiveness and maintain the decidability of the reasoning activities, we extend the kernel formalism into two alternative directions. The first formalism, OLCP, introduces the capability of expressing path relations. Because cyclic schemas are extremely useful, we introduce a second formalism, OLCD, with the capability of expressing cyclic descriptions but disallowing the expression of path relations. In fact, we show that the reasoning activity in OLCDP (i.e., OLCP with cycles) is undecidable.

ODB-QOPTIMIZER is a ODMG 93 compliant tool for the schema validation and semantic query optimization. The approach is based on two fundamental ingredients. The first one is the OCDL description logics (DLs) proposed as a common formalism to express class descriptions, a relevant set of integrity constraint rules (IC rules) and queries. The second one are DLs inference techniques, exploited to evaluate the logical implications expressed by IC rules and thus to produce the semantic expansion of a given query.