Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) is an area of research in which the objective is to provide access to heterogeneous data sources trough a mediating ontology. The ontology can then stand for semantic specification of the data in the sources, allowing systems to infer new knowledge about the data, to verify its integrity, to perform semantic data integration, to increase software modularity, etc.

The OBDA Plugin for Protege is an add-on for the Protege ontology editor aimed at transforming Protege into a fully fledged OBDA component editor. That is, it provides data source and mapping editors, as well as querying facilities that, in sum, allow you to design and test every aspect of an OBDA system. At the moment it supports relational data sources (RDBMS) and GLAV like mappings. More over, it provides additional querying facilities that allow the user to pose Union of Conjunctive Queries to the reasoner.

The plugin is able to interact (synchronize/query) with any reasoner implementing the DIG 1.1 Interface plus the OBDA extension to DIG 1.1. Additionally, the plugin allows users to pose Union of Conjunctive Queries (UCQ’s) over the ontology; in order to answer these queries the reasoner can interface with any reasoner implementing the DIG 1.2 Conjunctive Query extensions defined by Racer Systems (link).

Requirements:
  • Protege 3.3.1(Protege 3.4 and Protege 4 versions coming in the near future)
  • A reasoner implementing the OBDA extensions to DIG 1.1 (e.g., the DIG server for QuOnto)
  • Jena 2.5.5

Important note: The software available here is beta software. It contains many known and unknown bugs. If you encounter any problems using the software, please feel free to contact the authors.

Update (02/Nov/09): Development for the DIG 1.1, Protege 3.3 compatible version of the software (OBDA plugin for Protege and QuOnto's DIG Server) has stopped. All development is now focused on the OWLAPI/Protege 4 version of all the software. These versions are much more stable and provide many new features and performance enhancements. The packages are now under closed beta testing phase. If you would like to participate in the testing, please contact the authors. The expected release date for this software is the first half of 2010.


About OBDA


For more OBDA resources at the Free University of Bozen Bolzano follow this link.