Ontology-Based Data Access - Beyond Relational Sources

The database (DB) landscape has been significantly diversified during the last decade, resulting in the emergence of a variety of non-relational (also called NoSQL) DBs, e.g., xmL and JSON-document DBs, key-value stores, and graph DBs. To enable access to such data, we generalize the well-known ontology-based data access (OBDA) framework so as to allow for querying arbitrary data sources using SPARQL. We propose an architecture for a generalized OBDA system implementing the virtual approach. Then, to investigate feasibility of OBDA over non-relational DBs, we compare an implementation of an OBDA system over MongoDB, a popular JSON-document DB, with a triple store.This article is an extended and revised version of an article that appeared in the proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) [4].