Expanding the reach of ontology-based data access

The project

Why ontology-based data access?

In a data-driven society where decision-making depends on advanced data analysis, valuable information is often scattered across multiple sources. Moreover, raw data is rarely available in a directly usable form: various transformation operations are required, such as reformatting, changing description vocabulary, normalizing units or making inferences to complete information. This raises the challenge of providing an integrated view of multiple data sources to allow for intuitive and efficient querying by a stakeholder.

The EXPAND project aims to facilitate data access and integration through the Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) technology. In a nutshell, OBDA provides a principled way of integrating multiple data sources by adding an ontological layer on top of them.

This paradigm has several benefits. First, OBDA allows one to unify and enrich data sources by establishing explicit relationships between raw data and ontology terms. Second, OBDA enables users to query diverse data repositories using a high-level vocabulary provided by the ontology, disregarding the actual data formats, while leveraging logical inference to retrieve richer answers than classical evaluation techniques. Third, by providing a unified view of information across multiple datasets and inferring missing information, OBDA allows for querying even incomplete databases.