Intended as a survey, this paper presents a historical glance at database management systems and their design going back to the 1960s.

Kogalovsky attempts to cover all facets of ontology-based data access systems, such as conceptual modeling, knowledge representation, logic and reasoning, querying, and database design, with a brief mention of semantic technologies. The paper advocates for ontology-based data access systems that use ontologies as conceptual models converted into relational models to fit relational databases. Special attention is given to reasoning and knowledge representation languages.

With the growth of semantic web technologies, triple stores have been created that store ontology-based data. However, it is very strange that while semantic web standards are mentioned on several occasions in the paper, software options that deliver semantic technologies, such as triple stores, including semantic repositories (OWLIM, Virtuoso, AllegroGraph) and SPARQL end points, are not discussed at all; this should have been done to make the survey complete and in line with contemporary advances in ontology-based systems. Additionally, some statements, accounts, and assertions are repeated in different sections of the paper, making it difficult to follow.

The author includes a very extensive list of references, refers to several ontology editors, and explains the evolution of some logical reasoning approaches. As such, this paper is useful reading for students, scholars, and science historians interested in the past half-century of developments in data modeling and systems based on ontologies.