[DL] Announcement: New OBDA systems

[Mariano Rodriguez]

We are pleased to announce the release of the OBDA Plugin for Protege
and the Quest reasoner, two systems for Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) that
will allow you start querying ontologies with very large volumes or data and/or 
link your databases to ontologies in no time.

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OBDA Plugin for Protege
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The OBDA Plugin is an add-on for the Protege ontology editor aimed at
transforming Protege into a fully fledged OBDA model editor. It provides data
source and mapping editors, as well as querying facilities that in conjunction
with an OBDA-enabled reasoner allow you to design and test every aspect of an
OBDA system without switching applications.

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Quest - A next generation OBDA reasoner
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Quest is a very powerful OBDA reasoner that offers query-answering services in
a variety of languages (SPARQL, UCQs, E-Tables) and supports reasoning in
RDFS, OWL2QL and DL-Lite-A ontologies. It is tuned for high-performance query
answering and is able to work in classic OBDA and virtual OBDA modes (i.e.,
on-the-fly access any database!). It supports JDBC databases as sources
(including database federation tools) and has been extensively tested with
MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2 and Oracle. Quest achieves its performance by means of
new techniques that guarantee very small and efficient SQL rewritings. Quest is
able to achieve split second query answering time even in the presence of very
large ontologies and very large volumes of data.

Both systems are now available for download at
http://obda.inf.unibz.it/protege-plugin/index.html

The current version is 1.5.1-RC1, a release candidate version we are
presenting to the community in preparation for the final release later this
year. The final release will include many more features and will be published
under an open source license. Feel free to contact us for comments, requests,
bug reports or any other OBDA related topic. 

Hoping to hear from you,
The OBDA Plugin team
http://obda.inf.unibz.it/protege-plugin/index.html
KRDB Research Centre,
Free University of Bolzano-Bozen