Predicting an Optimal Virtual Data Model for Uniform Access to Large Heterogeneous Data

The growth of generated data in the industry requires new efficient big data integration approaches for uniform data access by end-users to perform better business operations. Data virtualization systems, including Ontology-Based Data Access (ODBA) query data on-the-fly against the original data sources without any prior data materialization. Existing approaches by design use a fixed model e.g., TABULAR as the only Virtual Data Model - a uniform schema built on-the-fly to load, transform, and join relevant data. While other data models, such as GRAPH or DOCUMENT, are more flexible and, thus, can be more suitable for some common types of queries, such as join or nested queries. Those queries are hard to predict because they depend on many criteria, such as query plan, data model, data size, and operations. To address the problem of selecting the optimal virtual data model for queries on large datasets, we present a new approach that (1) builds on the principal of OBDA to query and join large heterogeneous data in a distributed manner and (2) calls a deep learning method to predict the optimal virtual data model using features extracted from SPARQL queries. OPTIMA - implementation of our approach currently leverages state-of-the-art Big Data technologies, Apache-Spark and Graphx, and implements two virtual data models, GRAPH and TABULAR, and supports out-of-the-box five data s ources m odels: property graph, document-based, e.g., wide-columnar, relational, and tabular, stored in Neo4j, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL, and CSV respectively. Extensive experiments show that our approach is returning the optimal virtual model with an accuracy of 0.831, thus, a reduction in query execution time of over 40% for the tabular model selection and over 30% for the graph model selection.