Real-world Assessment of Policy-Protected OBDA (Extended Abstract)

Proc. of the 38th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL). CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/. 2025.

Within the Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) framework, users can query relational data sources using an ontology to which the source is linked via declarative mappings. In a world where data sharing is widespread, ensuring privacy while managing data poses a significant challenge. Controlled Query Evaluation (CQE) is a privacy preserving query answering framework in the presence of ontologies, where policies representing confidential information are used to devise suitable censors that enforce data protection. The integration of CQE within OBDA was recently proposed through the Policy-Protected OBDA (PPOBDA) framework, which is based on embedding policies into mappings. Such framework is essentially theoretical, and the effectiveness with which PPOBDA policies are able to capture real-world privacy requirements has not been assessed so far. In this work, we carry out such an evaluation, utilizing the well-known MIMIC-III hospital dataset, which recently has been mapped, by adopting the OBDA framework, to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) ontology. We identify relevant privacy requirements by analyzing the legal regulations on data sharing expressed in HIPAA of US Federal Law and GDPR of the EU, show how they can be expressed via PPOBDA policies, and analyze the impact of these policies on the answers to a set of representative queries. Our analysis exposes both strengths and weaknesses of the PPOBA framework in relation to these practically relevant privacy regulations. Furthermore, we perform a performance evaluation of the OBDA framework implemented over the MIMIC-III dataset via the FHIR ontology, assessing the overhead introduced by the PPOBDA policies and its implications on such real-world use case.

@inproceedings{DL-2025,
   title = "Real-world Assessment of Policy-Protected OBDA (Extended
Abstract)",
   year = "2025",
   author = "Divya Ba2ura and Diego Calvanese",
   booktitle = "Proc. of the 38th Int. Workshop on Description Logics (DL)",
   publisher = "CEUR-WS.org",
   series = "CEUR Workshop Proceedings, https://ceur-ws.org/",
}