Integrating Ontologies and Relational Databases for An Improved Data Access

Abstract

Today, recent rapid advancements and developments in information and communication technologies have enabled the number of connected devices to increase gradually. Thus, a significant amount of data from many sources has been produced as a result of the increase in connected devices. It is now more crucial than ever to access and draw conclusions from the data kept in relational database management systems. Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) is a hugely important paradigm for leveraging Semantic Web technologies to access data stored in relational databases. Users access data via a conceptual layer in the OBDA paradigm. Data is stored in relational databases and is represented by the conceptual layer as an RDF(S) or OWL ontology. In this paper, a demonstration for the integration of a relational database and an ontology is presented in order to provide an ontology-based data access. The goal of the presented demonstration is to serve as a roadmap for further research studies. For this purpose, a data set stored in MySQL relational database management system is accessed using the OBDA model. Further, the Ontop Framework that is compatible with the Protégé ontology development environment is used to provide the integration between the ontology and the relational database. Moreover, the Ontop queries are executed over SPARQL.

Keywords

• Ontology
• Data Access
• Relational Databases
• Semantic Web
• SPARQL
• Ontop

References

1. [1] Haw, Su-Cheng, Jiawei Wilson May, and Samini Subramaniam. "Mapping relational databases to ontology representation: A review." Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Technology in Education. 2017.
2. [2] Calvanese, Diego, et al. "How to stay ontop of your data: Databases, ontologies and more." European Semantic Web Conference. Springer, Cham, 2015.
3. [3] Pankowski, Tadeusz. "Modeling and Querying Data in an Ontology-Based Data Access System." Procedia Computer Science 192 (2021): 497-506.
4. [4] Calvanese, Diego, et al. "Ontop: Answering SPARQL queries over relational databases." Semantic Web 8.3 (2017): 471-487.
5. [5] Bagosi, Timea, et al. "The ontop framework for ontology based data access." Chinese Semantic Web and Web Science Conference. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2014.
6. [6] Can, Özgü, and Murat Osman Ünalir. "Revisiting Ontology Based Access Control: The Case for Ontology Based Data Access." In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2022), pp. 515-518, 2022.
7. [7] Ontop. (2009). Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://ontop-vkg.org.
8. [8] Rodriguez-Muro, Mariano, Roman Kontchakov, and Michael Zakharyaschev. "Ontology-based data access: Ontop of databases." International Semantic Web Conference. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.

9. [9] Xiao, Guohui, et al. "Ontology-based data access: A survey." International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2018.
10. [10] Di Pinto, Floriana, et al. "Optimizing query rewriting in ontology-based data access." Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Extending Database Technology. 2013.
11. [11] Askar, Majid, et al. "Ontology Based Natural Language Queries Transformation into SPARQL Queries." Baltic Journal of Modern Computing 8.4 (2020): 719-731.
12. [12] Ronconi, Giacomo, et al. "The Mastro Protégé Plug-In for OBDA." JOWO. 2017.
13. [13] Protégé Ontology Editor. (2022). Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://protege.stanford.edu
14. [14] Namici, Manuel. "R2RML mappings in OBDA systems: Enabling comparison among OBDA tools." arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.01405 (2018).
15. [15] Kalayci, E., et al. "Ontology-based access to temporal data with Ontop: A framework proposal." International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science 29.1 (2019): 17-30.
16. [16] Employees Sample Database. MySQL. Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://dev.mysql.com/doc/employee/en/
17. [17] Lubbad, Motaz AM. Ontology Based Data Access with Relational Databases. Diss. Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2018.