UNiCS: The open data platform for Research and Innovation

The paper introduces UNiCS, the open platform for Research and Innovation data management. The UNiCS platform follows the Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) approach, which eases the access to a vast amount of heterogeneous data, offering the final users means by formulating queries using terms from the knowledge domain they are experts in. Therefore, each query gets transformed in a set of optimised queries to different data sources. The OBDA approach guarantees that the UNiCS underlying repository is always updated, anytime the data are modified in their original data sources, and it makes the semantics of the data explicit, thus offering an intuitive way to access, explore, visualise, analyse, and post-process them