DBOnto: Bridging Databases and Ontologies

信息来源和我们对它们的依赖正在以惊人的速度增加。最明显的例子是万维网的爆炸性增长和快速发展，但研究、工业、医疗保健和政府的其他项目也表现出对大规模数据的有效管理和利用的严重依赖。可用的信息类型也在迅速变化，通常包括非结构化和半结构化数据、流数据、噪声和不完整数据以及链接的数据集。同时处理快速增长的数据量、复杂性和异构性，对信息系统的研究提出了巨大的挑战，并产生了对能力更强的信息系统的迫切需求。满足这一需求将对英国未来的竞争力至关重要。信息系统显然在解决这些极其复杂的问题方面发挥着关键作用，但它们需要不断发展，以反映快速变化的信息格局。这一演变是新兴的语义感知数据管理领域的基础，该领域涉及本体推理和数据库管理原则的综合。语义感知系统使用丰富的模式(AKA本体)，允许它们处理来自不同来源的不完整和半结构化的信息，并以反映知识和数据的方式回答查询，即从信息中提供理解。然而，我们认为，如果这种系统要广泛应用，那么它们的增强能力必须是现有数据库系统良好的特征和高性能的补充，而不是替代；此外，我们认为，它们将需要纳入计算机科学的许多其他领域的技术，特别是那些为“大数据”管理提供补充观点的技术，如算法和机器学习、流处理和信息检索。牛津信息系统集团(ISG)的目标是开发完全实现所需综合的下一代语义感知数据管理系统。ISG在实现这种综合方面具有独特的地位：该集团在数据管理和基于本体的系统方面拥有世界领先的专业知识，与生命科学、政府和行业的信息系统用户和数据所有者建立了广泛的联系网络，并已在解决该领域一些最重要和最具挑战性的科学问题。平台资助将使我们能够进行全面实现我们雄心勃勃的目标所需的更长期、更大规模和更具冒险精神的研究，同时为我们的早期职业研究人员提供更广泛的职业发展机会。平台资助将用于为现有的PDRA团队提供稳定性和连续性，并将帮助我们继续吸引和留住来自世界各地的最有才华的年轻研究人员。它还将用于通过支持研究访问和短期探索性研究项目来发展新的学科内和学科间合作，并寻求与行业互动的新方法，建立和扩大我们已建立的合作关系。后者将包括，例如，在行业中长期嵌入PDRA，将我们的研究努力扩展到传统研究原型之外，将我们的工具专门用于特定行业，并使用它们在现实的工业环境中测试我们的研究假设。最后，平台资金将支持扩展的外联活动，包括开发和提供教程、短期课程和暑期学校。因此，平台资金将使我们能够解决一个战略上的重要问题，需要一个具有广泛专业知识的大型团队，并发展下一代研究领导者的职业生涯。

Sources of information and our dependence on them are increasing at a phenomenal rate. The most obvious example is the explosive growth and rapid evolution of the World Wide Web, but other projects in research, industry, healthcare and government also exhibit a critical dependence on the effective management and exploitation of large scale data. The kind of information available is also changing rapidly, and often includes unstructured and semi-structured data, streaming data, noisy and incomplete data, and linked datasets. Simultaneously dealing with the rapidly increasing size, complexity and heterogeneity of data presents a grand challenge for information systems research, and has created an urgent need for more capable information systems. Meeting this need will be critical to the UK's future competitiveness.Information systems clearly have a key role to play in addressing these extremely complex problems, but they need to evolve to reflect the rapidly changing information landscape. This evolution is the basis for the emerging field of semantics-aware data management, which involves a synthesis of ontological reasoning and database management principles. Semantics-aware systems employ rich schemas (AKA ontologies) that allow them to deal with incomplete and semi-structured information from heterogeneous sources, and to answer queries in a way that reflects both knowledge and data, i.e., to deliver understanding from information.We believe, however, that if such systems are to be widely applicable, then their enhanced capabilities must, be in addition to, and not instead of, the well-established features and high performance of existing database systems; moreover, we believe that they will need to incorporate techniques from many other areas of computer science, particularly those that give a complementary view of ``Big Data'' management, such as algorithms and machine learning, stream processing, and information retrieval. The goal of the Oxford Information Systems Group (ISG) is to develop next generation semantics-aware data management systems that fully realise the desired synthesis.ISG is uniquely positioned to realise such a synthesis: the group has world-leading expertise in both data management and ontology-based systems, an extensive network of contacts with information system users and data owners in the life sciences, government and industry, and is already tackling some of the most important and challenging scientific problems in the area. A platform grant would allow us to undertake the longer term, larger scale and more adventurous research that will be required in order to fully realise our ambitious goals, and at the same time offer an enhanced range of career development opportunities to our early-career researchers.Platform funding would be used to provide stability and continuity for the existing PDRA team, and would help us to continue to attract and retain the most talented young researchers from around the world. It would also be used to develop new intra- and inter-disciplinary collaborations via support for research visits and short exploratory research projects, and to pursue new approaches to interaction with industry, building on and extending our established collaborations. The latter would include, e.g., the longer term embedding of PDRAs in industry, extending our research efforts beyond the traditional research prototype, specialising our tools for particular industries, and using them to test our research hypotheses in realistic industrial environments. Finally, platform funding would support extended outreach activities, including the development and delivery of tutorials, short courses, and a summer school.Platform funding would thus enable us both to tackle a strategically important problem requiring a large team with a wide range of expertise, and to develop the careers of the next generation of research leaders.