Ontology Representation and Querying for Realizing Semantics-Driven Applications

Abstract

In recent years ontologies – shared conceptualizations of some domain – are increasingly seen as the key to further advances in automation of information processing. Although many approaches for representing and querying ontologies have already been devised, they haven’t found their way into enterprise applications yet. Many of them offer a high degree of expressivity, but require complicated reasoning and query answering procedures, and often lack features needed in practical applications, such as constraints and meta-concept modeling. This is compounded by the lack of critical technical features in ontology management tools, such as scalability, reliability, concurrency and the support for ontology modularization. We present an approach for ontology representation and querying that balances some of the trade-offs to more easily integrate into existing enterprise information infrastructure. In particular, we focus on efficient evaluation of queries using existing information management infrastructure, such as relational databases. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation within KAON, the Karlsruhe Ontology and Semantic Web tool suite.