A survey of ontology based databases

Abstract

In the semantic web not only the syntax and structure of data is defined, but also the semantics. An ontology can be used to describe these semantics. A database, in which an ontology and its instances are stored together, is called an ontology based database (OBDB). Several OBDBs have been developed that use different approaches on how to store and manage the ontologies and their instances. This paper will report on the results of a comparative study done on a selection of OBDBs and an ideal OBDB composed with the knowledge gained from analyzing the selection of OBDBs.