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This paper presents the research summary of my Ph.D. plan, which is currently in the early stages of its development. The objectives around which my work is focusing and that I will continue to pursue throughout the remainder of my doctoral activities are the development of tools and the definition of a methodology for the execution of those tasks that are typically performed when working with ontologies in the context of Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA). The objective of this methodology is to guide the ontology engineer through ontology design, representation and approximation, and the issues I will address in order to provide the necessary tools to achieve this goal are the optimization of ontology classification in DL-Lite, the definition of a graphical language tailored towards ontologies, and the study of approximation of ontologies in expressive languages into DL-Lite logics. Such methodology proves to be necessary when facing the numerous challenges that often arise in real-world scenarios, in which the amount of data that is managed by information systems, and the processes that manage and act on this data grow continuously.