English querying over ontologies: E-QuOnto

Relational database (DB) management systems provide the standard means for structuring and querying large amounts of data. However, to access such data the exact structure of the DB must be know, and such a structure might be far from the conceptualization of a human being of the stored information. Ontologies help to bridge this gap, by providing a high level conceptual view of the information stored in a DB in a cognitively more natural way. Even in this setting, casual end users might not be familiar with the formal languages required to query ontologies. In this paper we address this issue and study the problem of ontology-based data access by means of natural language questions instead of queries expressed in some formal language. Specifically, we analyze how complex real life questions are and how far from the query languages accepted by ontology-based data access systems, how we can obtain the formal query representing a given natural language question, and how can we handle those questions which are too complex wrt the accepted query language.