A Hybrid Approach for Relating OWL 2 Ontologies and Relational Databases

摘要

Relating Semantic Web ontologies with relational databases becomes a topical problem as ontologies provide more and richer capabilities for accessing information that is currently closed in heterogeneous and distributed sources e.g. relational databases. The growing number of tools and methodologies are considering this problem but usually they are looking from the point of view of ontologies or from the point of databases. We propose a hybrid approach where ontology classes and properties are mapped to database schema and instances are stored in database tables while more complex constructs that cannot be adequately represented by database concepts are stored in metadata tables. This allows the lossless, bidirectional transformations between ontologies and databases combining advantages and addressing the needs of both worlds.