[DL] Survey about and testing of OBDA

[Marijke Keet]

Dear All,

The following may be of interest to those of you who are, or have been, 
directly involved in development of /real/ domain ontologies (not just 
toy ontologies and examples).

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 From the ontology development communities, there have been many 
requests for scalable ontologies and ontology-driven information 
systems. We---at the universities La Sapienza and Bolzano, as 
participant and leader of the EU FP6 TONES Project [1]---have developed 
such tools. That is, we know that both in theory and with test data, the 
tools for Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) perform significantly 
better, but we would like to examine that against real data---the bigger 
the amount of data and ontology you have, the better.

While at this time we’ll not disclose the precise hypotheses, they 
obviously revolve around the practical aspects of the trade-off between 
expressiveness of the ontology language and efficient, scalable 
computation.
To this end, we have set up a questionnaire [2] about usage and feature 
requests, of which we hope you will take the 5 minutes to complete, and 
we will test with bio-ontologies that are---or wish to be---linked to 
databases to assess things like performance of (conjunctive) query 
answering and instance classification.

An informal description with links to the main references of some of the 
tools and their theoretical foundations is available at [3]. Interested 
readers may like to play with the OBDA tools in their own lab already; a 
pre-release can be downloaded from [4].
Also, if you would like to be involved in the testing, please do not 
hesitate to contact undersigned and/or Mariano Rodriguez 
(mrodriguez at inf.unibz.it).

[1] http://www.tonesproject.org/
[2] https://www.inf.unibz.it/phpsurveyor/index.php?sid=10
[3] 
http://keet.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/tools-to-access-data-through-an-ontology/
[4] http://www.inf.unibz.it/~rodriguez/OBDA/beta06/index.html 
<http://www.inf.unibz.it/%7Erodriguez/OBDA/beta06/index.html>

Best regards,
Marijke

C. Maria Keet
KRDB Research Centre
Faculty of Computer Science
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Piazza Domenicani 3
39100 Bozen-Bolzano
Italy
tel: +39 04710 161287
fax: +39 04710 16009
email: keet at inf.unibz.it <mailto:keet at inf.unibz.it>
web: http://www.inf.unibz.it/krdb/
home: http://www.meteck.org <http://www.meteck.org/>