Ontology-based data access to heterogeneous data sources : state-of-the-art approaches and applications

Abstract EN

The evolution of heterogeneous data residing in various data sources (e.g., relational, XML, document stores, etc.) increases the data integration challenges.

ontology based data access (OBDA) is a semantic web technology that comprises a set of algorithms and techniques for dealing with data heterogeneity.

ontologies are utilized in OBDA to provide a conceptual view over diverse datasets ; and the relationships between them are defined through mappings in two ways : data translation, and query translation.

the first method is referred to as materialization, where data transformation is achieved in accordance with the global view.

whereas in the second method, query transformation is carried out from the query language of the global schema into the original data source’s query language.

in this paper, we present the framework of OBDA by discussing the main components of ontology-based data access, techniques, applications and future challenges.