The role of class dependencies in designing ontology-based databases

Abstract

Recently, an important number of applications are producing and manipulating mountains of ontological data. Managing them efficiently needs the development of scalable solutions. Ontology-based databases (OBDB) are one of these solutions. An OBDB stores both ontological data and the ontology describing their meanings in the same repository. Several architectures supporting these OBDB were proposed by academicians and industrial editors of DBMS. Unfortunately, there is no available methodology for designing such OBDB. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes to scale up the traditional database design approaches to OBDB. Our approach covers both conceptual and logical modeling phases. It assumes the availability of a domain ontology composed by primitive (canonical) and defined (non-canonical) concepts. Dependencies among properties and classes are captured and exploited to define a normalized logical model. A prototype implementing our design methodology on the OBDB OntoDB is outlined. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.