The combined approach to ontology-based data access

The use of ontologies for accessing data is one of the most exciting new applications of description logics in databases and other information systems. A realistic way of realising sufficiently scalable ontology- based data access in practice is by reduction to querying relational databases. In this paper, we describe the combined approach, which incorporates the information given by the ontology into the data and employs query rewriting to eliminate spurious answers. We illustrate this approach for ontologies given in the DL-Lite family of description logics and briefly discuss the results obtained for the EL family

Scalable Ontology Systems

Since the adoption of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ontologies have become commonplace as a way to represent both knowledge and data. RDF databases have flexible schemas, are easy to integrate and allow a semantically rich query language. Unfortunately, these advantages come at the expense of increased query and application complexity. Existing RDF systems have attempted to address this problem by representing RDF data in relational format and translating queries and answers to and from SQL. As we will show, typical access patterns in RDF are substantially different than those in relational databases, to the extent that the performance of relational-backed systems degrades significantly for large datasets or complex queries. In this dissertation, we propose two solutions to the scalability issue in RDF databases. First, we introduce Annotated RDF, a representation language that extends the semantics of RDF by allowing triples to be annotated with partially ordered information such as temporal validity intervals, probabilities, provenance and many others. In standard RDF, using such information creates a blowup in the size of the database and therefore greatly increases the data complexity of queries. We define a query language for Annotated RDF that extends the RDF query language SPARQL and provides query processing and view maintenance algorithms. Our experimental evaluation shows Annotated RDF can answer queries 1.5 to 3.5 times faster than widely used systems such as Jena2, Sesame2 or Oracle 11g. Second, we introduce GRIN, to our knowledge the first index structure designed specifically for SPARQL queries. We describe query and update processing algorithms and a theoretical analysis of index optimization. GRIN is extended to Annotated RDF and evaluated thoroughly on real-world datasets of up to 26 million triples and benchmark synthetic datasets of up to 1 billion triples. Our results show that for SPARQL queries, GRIN outperforms all relational index structures at comparable resource expenditure. Moreover, we show GRIN can be integrated with Annotated RDF, but also with existing systems such as Jena2 or LucidDB

Semantic HMC for Big Data Analysis

Analyzing Big Data can help corporations to im-prove their efficiency. In this work we present a new vision to derive Value from Big Data using a Semantic Hierarchical Multi-label Classification called Semantic HMC based in a non-supervised Ontology learning process. We also proposea Semantic HMC process, using scalable Machine-Learning techniques and Rule-based reasoning

Bioinformatics service reconciliation by heterogeneous schema transformation

This paper focuses on the problem of bioinformatics service reconciliation in a generic and scalable manner so as to enhance interoperability in a highly evolving field. Using XML as a common representation format, but also supporting existing flat-file representation formats, we propose an approach for the scalable semi-automatic reconciliation of services, possibly invoked from within a scientific workflows tool. Service reconciliation may use the AutoMed heterogeneous data integration system as an intermediary service, or may use AutoMed to produce services that mediate between services. We discuss the application of our approach for the reconciliation of services in an example bioinformatics workflow. The main contribution of this research is an architecture for the scalable reconciliation of bioinformatics services