Ontologies versus relational databases: Are they so different? A comparison

Artificial Intelligence Review

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 271-290

  Martinez Cruz, Carmen ^a   Blanco, Ignacio J ^b   Vila, M Amparo ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF JAÉN   (Spain)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA   (Spain)

Author keywords

Ontologies; Ontology based databases; Relational databases

Indexed keywords

DATABASE MODELS; INFORMATION MODELING; ONTOLOGY-BASED; RELATIONAL DATABASE;

INFORMATION THEORY; ONTOLOGY;

DATABASE SYSTEMS;

EID: 84870244777     PISSN: 02692821     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10462-011-9251-9     Document Type: Review

References (113)

1. Agarwal P (2005) Ontological considerations in GIScience. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 19(5):501-536
2. Ankolekar A, Krötzsch M, Tran T., Vrandecic D. (2007) The two cultures: mashing up web 2.0 and the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on world wide web, Banff, Alberta, Canada. ACM, NY USA, pp 825-834. doi:10.1145/1242572.1242684
3. Astrova I (2004) Reverse engineering of relational databases to ontologies. In: Proceedings of the 1st Europan semantic web symposium (ESWS), LNCS, vol 3053, pp 327-341
4. Astrova I (2005) Towards the semantic web - an approach to reverse engineering of relational databases to ontologies. In: Advances in Databases and Information Systems: 9th East-European Conference, ADBIS 2005, pp 111-122
5. Bach D (2006-2007) Bui: Import/export of OWL Ontologies into/from DOGMA PhD.: Department of computer science, Semantics Technology and Applications Research Lab, Vjire Universiteit Brussel
6. Barrasa J, Corcho O, Pérez AG (2003) Fund finder: a case study of database to ontology mapping. In: Proceedings of the international semantic web conference, vol 2870 in lecture notes in computer science. Springer, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, pp 17-22
7. Benslimane SM, Benslimane D, Malki M., Amghar Y, Saliah H. (2006) Acquiring owl ontologies from data-intensive web sites. In: ACM (eds), Proceedings of the sixth international conference on web engineering (ICWE'06), pp 361-368
8. Berners-Lee T., Hendler J, Lassila O. (2001) The semantic web. In: Scientific American, pp 28-37
9. Berson A, Smith S.J. (1997) Data warehousing, data mining, and olap. McGraw-Hill Inc., New York
10. Bizer C (2003) In: D2r map - a database to rdf mapping language. In: Proceedings of the 12th International world wide web conference, pp 17-22
11. Borgida A (1995) Description logics in data management. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng, 7:671-682. doi:10. 1109/69.469829
12. Borgida A, Brachman RJ, McGuinness D.L., Resnick L.A. (1989) Classic: a structural data model for objects. In: SIGMOD '89: proceedings of the 1989 ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 58-67. doi:10.1145/67544.66932
13. Borst P, Akkermans H, Top J. (1997) Engineering ontologies. Int J Hum -Comput Stud 46(2-3):365-406. doi:10.1006/ijhc.1996.0096
14. Brambilla M, Celino I, Ceri S., Cerizza Della Valle E, Facca F (2006) A software engineering approach to design and development of semantic web service applications. In: The semantic web - ISWC 2006, vol 4273. Springer, Berlin, pp 172-186. doi:10.1007/11926078-13
15. Breu M, Ding Y. (2004) Modelling the world: databases and ontologies. In: Whitepaper by IFI, Institute of Computer Science. University of Innsbruck
16. Brockmans S, Haase P, Hitzler P. (2006) A metamodel and uml profile for rule-extended owl dl ontologies. In: Sure JDY (ed) The semantic web: research and applications: 3rd European semantic web conference, ESWC 2006, vol 4011, pp 303-316
17. Broekstra J, Kampman A, van Harmelen F (2002) Sesame: a generic architecture for storing and querying RDF and RDF schema. In: Proceedings of the first international semantic web conference (ISWC 2002), Sardinia, Italy, LNCS, vol 2342. Springer, Berlin, pp 54-68. doi:10.1007/3-540-48005-6-7
18. Calero C, Piattini M. (2006) An ontological approach to SQL:2003. In: Ontologies for software engineering and software technology, Chapter 7. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp 197-216.
19. Calero C, Ruiz F, Baroni A., Brito e Abreu F, Piattini M (2006) In: Proceedings of computer standards interfaces. Elsevier, Ireland, pp 695-713
20. Cerbah F (2008) Learning highly structured semantic repositories from relational databases. In: The semantic web: research and applications, lecture notes in computer science, vol 5021. Springer, Berlin, pp777-781
21. Champin PA, Houben G, Thiran P. (2007) Cross: an owl wrapper for reasoning on relational databases. In: Proceedings of the 26th international conference on Conceptual modeling. Springer, Auckland, New Zealand, pp 502-517. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1784489.1784533
22. Codd EF (1970) A relational model of data for large shared data banks. Commun ACM 13(6):377-387
23. Corcho O, López-Cima A, Gómez-Pérez A (2006) The odesew 2.0 semantic web application framework. In: WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 1049-1050. doi:10.1145/1135777.1136009
24. Cullot N, Parent C, Spaccapietra S., Vangenot C. (2003) Ontologies: a contribution to the dl/db debate. In: Proceedings of the first international workshop on semantic web and databases (VLDB workshop)
25. Cure O, Bensaid J.D. (2008) Integration of relational databases into owl knowledge bases: demonstration of the dbom system. In: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE 24th international conference on data engineering workshop, pp 230-233. doi:10.1109/ICDEW.2008.4498323
26. d'Aquin M., Baldassare C, Gridinoc L., Sabou M, Angeletou S, Motta E. (2007) Watson: supporting next generation semantic web applications. In: Proceedings of WWW/Internet conference 2007
27. d'Aquin M., Motta E, Sabou M., Angeletou S, Gridinoc L, Lopez V., Guidi D. (2008) Toward a new generation of semantic web applications. IEEE Intell Syst 23(3):20-28. doi:10.1109/MIS.2008.54
28. Dehainsala H, Pierra G, Bellatreche L., Ontodb L. (2007) An ontology-based database for data intensive applications. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on database systems for advanced applications (DASFAA'07), Bangkok, Thailand. LNCS, Springer, Berlin, pp 497-508
29. Dillon T, Chang E, Hadzic M., Wongthongtham P. (2008) Differentiating conceptual modelling from data modelling, knowledge modelling and ontology modelling and a notation for ontology modelling. In: APCCM '08: proceedings of the fifth on Asia-Pacific conference on conceptual modelling. Australian Computer Society Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, pp 7-17
30. Ding L, Finin T, Joshi A., Pan R, Cost RS, Peng Y, Reddivari P., Doshi V, Sachs J. (2004) Swoogle: a search and metadata engine for the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on information and knowledge management, CIKM '04. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 652-659
31. Doan A, Madhavan J, Domingos P., Halevy A. (2002) Learning to map between ontologies on the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the eleventh international WWW conference. Hawaii
32. Dou D, LePendu P. (2006) Ontology-based integration for relational databases. In: SAC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, pp 461-466. doi:10.1145/1141277.1141387
33. El-Ghalayini H., Odeh M, McClatchey R. (2007) Engineering conceptual data models from domain ontologies: a critical evaluation. In: International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (IJITWE), IGI Global
34. Fankam C, Jean S, Bellatreche L., Aït-Ameur Y (2008) Extending the ansi/sparc architecture database with explicit data semantics: an ontology-based approach. In: ECSA '08: Proceedings of the 2nd European conference on software architecture. Springer, Berlin, pp 318-321
35. Fensel D (2004) Ontologies: silver bullet for knowledge management and electronic commerce, 2nd edn. Springer, Berlin
36. Finin T, Mayfield J, Joshi A., Cost RS, Fink C. (2005) Information retrieval and the semantic web. In: HICSS '05: Proceedings of the 38th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 4. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, p 113.1. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2005.319
37. Franconi E (2008) Ontologies and databases: myths and challenges. Proc VLDB Endow 1(2):1518-1519. doi:10.1145/1454159.1454218
38. Gali A, Chen C, Claypool K., Uceda-Sosa R (2005) From ontology to relational databases. In: Conceptual Modeling for Advanced Application Domains, LNCS, vol 3289, pp 278-289
39. Gennari J, Nguyen M, Silberfein A. (2007) Datagenie. Web resource. http://protege.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DataGenie
40. Gennari JH, Musen MA, Fergerson R.W., Grosso WE, Crubézy M, Eriksson H., Noy NF, Tu S.W. (2003) The evolution of protégé: an environment for knowledge-based systems development. Int J Hum -Comput Stud 58(1):89-123
41. Gómez-Pérez A, Férnandez-López M, Corcho-García O (2003a) Metodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. where is their meeting point? In: Data knowledge engineering, vol 46. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp 41-64
42. Gómez-Pérez A, Férnandez-López M, Corcho-García O (2003b) Ontological engineering. Springer, Verlag, London
43. Graves M, Goldfarb C.F. (2001) Designing xml databases. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River
44. Gruber TR (1993) Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. Technical Report KSL 93-04, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Standford University
45. Guarino N (1995) Formal ontology, concept analysis and knowledge representation. Int J Hum Comput Stud 43:625-640
46. Guarino N (1998) Formal ontologies and information systems. In: Proceedings of FOIS98, pp 3-15
47. Guarino N, Welty C. (2000) Ontological analysis of taxonomic relationships. Data Knowl Eng 39:51-74
48. Hai DH (2005) Schema matching ans mapping-based data integration. Ph.D. thesis, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics and Department of Computer Science. University of Leipzig, Germany
49. Heath T, Motta E. (2008) Ease of interaction plus ease of integration: Combining web2.0 and the semantic web in a reviewing site. Web Semant Sci Serv Agents World Wide Web 6(1):76-83. doi:10.1016/j.websem. 2007.11.009
50. HP Labs Semantic Web Programme (2007) Jena, a semantic web framework for java. http://jena.sourceforge.net/
51. Hu J, Nicholson D, Mungall C., Hillyard AL, Archibald A.L. (1996) Webintool: a generic web to database interface building tool. In: DEXA '96: proceedings of the 7th international workshop on database and expert systems applications. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, p 285
52. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (1999) Information technology: ISO/IEC 9075-2:1999. Part 2: foundation (SQL/Foundation)
53. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (2003) Information technology: ISO/IEC 9075-2:2003, part 2: foundation (SQL/Foundation) and ISO/IEC 9075-11:2003, part 11: information and definition schemas (SQL/Schemata)
54. Jean S, Pierra G, AitAmeur Y. (2006) Domain ontologies: a database-oriented analisys. In: Proceedings of the web information systems and technologies (WEBIST'2006)
55. Juric D, Skocir Z. (2007) Building owl ontologies by analyzing relational database schema concepts and wordnet semantic relations. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on telecommunications. ConTEL 2007
56. Jurisica I, Mylopoulos J, Yu E. (1999) Using ontologies for knowledge management: an information systems perspective. In: Proceedings of 62nd annual meeting of the american society for information science (ASISI99), pp 482-496
57. Kampman A, Broekstra J. (2007) Sesame. Web resource. http://www.openrdf. org
58. Kashyap V (1999) Design and creation of ontologies for environmental information retrieval. In: Proceedings of the twelfth workshop on knowledge acquisition, modeling and management. Voyager Inn, Banff, Alberta, Canada. http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/aabecker/Banff99/Proceedings/accepted.html
59. Kim W (1990) Introduction to object-oriented databases. MIT Press, Cambridge
60. Konstantinou N, Spanos DE, Mitrou N. (2008) Ontology and database mapping: a survey of current implementations and future directions. J Web Eng 7(1):1-24
61. Kupfer A, Eckstein S, Neumann K., Mathiak B. (2006) Handling changes of database schemas and corresponding ontologies. In: Roddick JF, Benjamins VR, Cherfi SS, Chiang RHL, Claramunt C, Elmasri R, Grandi F, Han H, Hepp M, Lytras MD, Misic VB, Poels G, Song I, Trujillo J, Vangenot C (eds) ER (Workshops), lecture notes in computer science, vol 4231. Springer, Berlin, pp 227-236
62. Lassila O, McGuinness D. (2002) The role of frame-based representation on the semantic web technical report DSL-01-02. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California
63. Lausen H, Stolberg M. (2004) Semantic web portals - state of the art survey. Technical report, DERI, digital Enterprise Research Institute. Technical Report 2004-04-03
64. Lubyte L, Tessaris S. (2007) Extracting ontologies from relational databases. krdb research centre technical report krdb07-4. Technical report, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
65. Ma Z (2005) Fuzzy database modeling with XML (The Kluwer international series on advances in database systems). Springer, New York
66. Ma Z (2006) Fuzzy database modeling of imprecise and uncertain engineering information (Studies in fuzzi-ness and soft computing). Springer, New York
67. Marcus S, Subrahmanian V.S. (1996) Foundations of multimedia database systems. J ACM 43(3):474-523. doi:10.1145/233551.233554
68. Martin D, Domingue J, Brodie M.L., Leymann F. (2007) Semantic web services, part 1. IEEE Intell Syst 22(5):12-17. doi:10.1109/MIS.2007.94
69. Martínez-Cruz C., Blanco IJ, Vila M.A. (2008) The use of ontologies for representing database schemas of fuzzy information. Int J Intell Syst 23(4):419-445
70. Martínez-Cruz C., Vila MA, Blanco I. (2007) Looking for information in fuzzy relational databases accessible via the web. In: Handbook of research on web information systems quality, chapter XVIII. Idea Group Reference, pp 300-324
71. McCool R (2005) Rethinking the semantic web, part I. IEEE Internet Comput, 9(6):86-88
72. McCool R (2006) Rethinking the semantic web, part II. IEEE Internet Comput, 10(1):93-96
73. Meersman R (2001) Ontologies and databases: More than a fleeting resemblance. In: Proceedings of international workshop on open enterprise solutions: systems, experiences, and organizations (OES-SEO), Luiss Publications, Rome. http://www.starlab.vub.ac.be/staff/robert/Research
74. Mena E, Illarramendi A. (2001) Ontology-based query processing for global information systems. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell
75. Mizoguchi R, Vanwelkenhuysen J, Ikeda M. (1995) Task ontology for reuse of problem solving knowledge. In: Mars N (ed) Towards very large knowledge bases: knowledge building and knowledge sharing (KBKS'95). University of Twente IOS Press, Enschede pp 46-57
76. Motta E, Sabou M. (2006) Next generation semantic web applications. In: The semantic web ASWC 2006, pp 24-29
77. Mylopoulos J (2007) Ontologies. Tutorial notes. Web resource. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/jm/2507S/Notes04/Ontologies.pdf
78. Neches R, Fikes R, Finin T., Gruber T, Patil R, Senator T., Swartout W.R. (1991) Enabling technology for knowledge sharing. AI Mag 12(3):36-56
79. Noy NF (2004) Tools for mapping and merging ontologies, handbook on ontologies. Springer, Berlin 366-384
80. Oracle (2007) Isqlplus web enviroment. Web resource. http://150.214.108. 124/isqlplus(2007)
81. Özsu MT, Valduriez P (1991) Distributed database systems: Where are we now?. Computer 24(8):68-78. doi:10.1109/2.84879
82. Pan Z, Heflin J. (2003) Dldb: Extending relational databases to support semantic web queries. In: Workshop on practical and scaleable semantic web systms, ISWC 2003, pp 109-113
83. Pardede E, Rahayu J, Taniar D. (2005) New SQL standard in database modeling, encyclopedia of information science and technology. IDEA Publishing, USA 2116-2121
84. Pérez de Laborda C, Conrad S (2005) Relational.owl: a data and schema representation format based on owl. In: CRPIT '43: proceedings of the 2nd Asia-Pacific conference on conceptual modelling. Australian Computer Society Inc., Darlinghurst, Australia, pp 89-96
85. Reiter R (1982) Towards a logical reconstruction of relational database theory. In: On conceptual modelling: perspectives from artificial intelligence, databases, and programming languages (Topics in information systems). Springer Verlag. New York, pp 191-233, 1984
86. Roldón M., Montes JFA (2005) A tool for storing owl using database technology. In: Proceedings of the OWLED '05 workshop on OWL: experiences and directions, vol 188. Galway, Ireland, pp 1-10
87. Ruiz F, Hilera J.R. (2006) Using ontologies in software engineering and technology ontologies for software engineering and software technology. Springer, Berlin 49-102
88. Shadbolt N, Lee BT, Hall W. (2006) The semantic web revisited. IEEE Intell Syst 21(3):96-101
89. Sharman R, Kishore R, Ramesh R. (2006) Ontologies: a Handbook of principles, concepts and applications in information systems (Integrated series in information systems). Springer, New York
90. Sheth A, Ramakrishnan C, Thomas C. (2005) Semantics for the semantic web: the implicit, the formal and the powerful. J Semant Web Inf Syst 1:1-18
91. Sonia D, Khan S. (2008) R2o transformation system: relation to ontology transformation for scalable data integration. In: IDEAS '08: proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on database engineering and applications. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 291-295 doi:10.1145/1451940.1451982
92. Spyns P, Meersman R, Jarrar M. (2002) Data modelling versus ontology engineering. In: SIGMOD Record. pp 12-17
93. Staab S, Studer R. (2004) Handbook on ontologies. Springer, Berlin
94. Steve G, Gangemi A, Pisanelli D. (1998) Integrating medical terminologies with onions methodology. http://saussure.irmkant.rm.cnr.it
95. Stojanovic L, Stojanovic N, Volz R. (2002) Migrating data-intensive web sites into the semantic web. In: SAC '02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM symposium on applied computing. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 1100-1107 doi:10.1145/508791. 509008
96. Studer R, Benjamins V, Fensel D. (1998) Knowledge engineering: principles and methods. IEEE Trans Data Knowl Eng 25(1-2):161-197
97. Swartout B, Patil R, Knight K., Russ T. (1996) Toward distributed use of large-scale ontologies. In: Proceedings of the 10th workshop on knowledge acquisition. Banff, Canada
98. Tijerino YA, Embley DW, Lonsdale D.W., Ding Y., Nagy G. (2005) Towards ontology generation from tables. World Wide Web 8(3):261-285
99. Tran T, Lewen H, Haase P. (2007) On the role and application of ontologies in information systems. In: RIVF, pp 14-21
100. Trinh Q, Barker K, Alhajj R. (2006) Rdb2ont: A tool for generating owl ontologies from relational database systems. In: AICT/ICIW, p 170
101. Unchold M, Gruninger M. (2004) Ontologies and semantics for seamless connectivity. SIGMOD Rec 33(4):58-64
102. Upadhyaya SR, Kumar P.S. (2005) Eronto: a tool for extracting ontologies from extended e/r diagrams. In: SAC '05: proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on applied computing. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 666-670. doi:10.1145/1066677. 1066828
103. Uschold M (1998) Knowledge level modelling: concepts and terminology. Knowl Eng Rev 13:5-29
104. Uschold M, GrüningerM (1996) Ontologies: principles, methods, and applications. Knowl Eng Rev 11(2):93-155
105. van Heijst G., Schereiber A, Wielinga B. (1997) Using explicit ontologies in kbs development. Int J Hum -Comput Stud 45:193-292
106. Vysniauskas E, Nemuraite L. (2006) Transforming ontology representation from owl to relational database. Inf Technol Control 35(3A):333-343
107. W3C OWL Working Group (2009) OWL-2 web ontology language: document overview. W3C recommendation (27 October 2009). http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2- overview/
108. Wand Y, Storey VC, Weber R. (1999) An ontological analysis of the relationship construct in conceptual modeling. ACM Trans Database Syst 24(4):494-528. doi:10.1145/331983.331989
109. Wilks Y (2002) Ontotherapy or, how to stop worrying about what there is. In: Ontolex 2002 (workshop held in conjunction with LREC 2002), Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Invited presentation
110. Xu Z, Cao X, Dong Y., Su W. (2004) Formal approach and automated tool for translating er schemata into owl ontologies. In: PAKDD, pp 464-475
111. Yabloko L, Software N.G. (2007) Ontobase plug-in for protg. http://www.ontospace.net/pages/3/index.htm
112. Zhang Y, Vasconcelos W, Sleeman D. (2005) Ontosearch: an ontology search engine. In: Bramer M, Coenen F, Allen T (eds) Research and development in intelligent systems XXI. Springer, London pp 58-69
113. Zhang J (2007) Ontology and the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the North American symposium on knowledge organization, vol 1. http://dlist.sir. arizona.edu/1897/