Abstract
We show how JSON documents can be abstracted as concept descriptions in an appropriate Description Logic (DL). This representation allows the use of a DL ontology, which includes naming conventions (“referring expression types (RETs)”) for instances of certain primitive concepts, in order to locate (perhaps multiple) subdocuments of the original JSON document capturing information about some particular conceptual entity. Detecting such situations allows for normalizing the JSON document into several separate smaller documents that capture all information about each such conceptual entity. This transformation preserves all the original information present in the input document. The RET assignment enables more refined and normalized capture of documents, and lead to query answers that adhere better to user expectations. We also show how RETs allow checking for a document admissibility condition ensuring that each final subdocument describes a single conceptual entity.