Ontology-based data access with databases: a short course

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is regarded as a key ingredient of the new generation of information systems. In the OBDA paradigm, an ontology defines a high-level global schema of (already existing) data sources and provides a vocabulary for user queries. An OBDA system rewrites such queries and ontologies into the vocabulary of the data sources and then delegates the actual query evaluation to a suitable query answering system such as a relational database management system or a datalog engine. In this chapter, we mainly focus on OBDA with the ontology language OWL 2QL, one of the three profiles of the W3C standard Web Ontology Language OWL 2, and relational databases, although other possible languages will also be discussed. We consider different types of conjunctive query rewriting and their succinctness, different architectures of OBDA systems, and give an overview of the OBDA system Ontop

Query rewriting over shallow ontologies

We investigate the size of rewritings of conjunctive queries over OWL2QL ontologies of depth 1 and 2 by means of a new hypergraph formalism for computing Boolean functions. Both positive and negative results are obtained. All conjunctive queries over ontologies of depth 1 have polynomial-size nonrecursive datalog rewritings; tree-shaped queries have polynomial-size positive existential rewritings; however, for some queries and ontologies of depth 1, positive existential rewritings can only be of superpolynomial size. Both positive existential and nonrecursive datalog rewritings of conjunctive queries and ontologies of depth 2 suffer an exponential blowup in the worst case, while first-order rewritings can grow superpolynomially unless NP is included in� P/poly