Semantic Technologies for Data Access and Integration.

Recently, semantic technologies have been successfully deployed to overcome the typical difficulties in accessing and integrating data stored in different kinds of legacy sources. In particular, knowledge graphs are being used as a mechanism to provide a uniform representation of heterogeneous information. Such graphs represent data in the RDF format, which is complemented by an ontology and can be queried using the standard SPARQL language. The RDF graph is often obtained by materializing source data, following the traditional extract-transform-load workflow. Alternatively, the sources are declaratively mapped to the ontology, and the RDF graph is maintained virtual. In such an approach, usually called ontology-based data access/integration (OBDA/I), query answering is based on sophisticated query transformation techniques. In this tutorial: (i) we provide a general introduction to semantic technologies; (ii) we illustrate the principles underlying OBDA/I, providing insights into its theoretical foundations, and describing well-established algorithms, techniques, and tools; (iii) we discuss relevant use-cases for OBDA/I; (iv) we provide an overview on some recent advancements.