Ontology Assisted Query Reformulation Using Semantic and Assertion Capabilities of OWL-DL Ontologies

TL;DR

This paper presents a method that uses OWL-DL ontologies to reformulate complex database queries, making biomedical data more accessible to users unfamiliar with data structures.

Contribution

It introduces ontology-based query reformulation algorithms leveraging semantic and assertion features of OWL-DL ontologies for biomedical data access.

Findings

Applied to the Health-e-Child database schema

Improved query formulation for biomedical data access

Utilized semantic relationships for query reformulation

Abstract

End users of recent biomedical information systems are often unaware of the storage structure and access mechanisms of the underlying data sources and can require simplified mechanisms for writing domain specific complex queries. This research aims to assist users and their applications in formulating queries without requiring complete knowledge of the information structure of underlying data sources. To achieve this, query reformulation techniques and algorithms have been developed that can interpret ontology-based search criteria and associated domain knowledge in order to reformulate a relational query. These query reformulation algorithms exploit the semantic relationships and assertion capabilities of OWL-DL based domain ontologies for query reformulation. In this paper, this approach is applied to the integrated database schema of the EU funded Health-e-Child (HeC) project with the aim of providing ontology assisted query reformulation techniques to simplify the global access that is needed to millions of medical records across the UK and Europe.