Ontology Management for Large-Scale Enterprise Systems

Abstract

Semantic markup languages such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) (RDF, 1999) and OWL (Web Ontology Language) (OWL, 2004) are increasingly being used to externalize metadata or ontologies about data, software and services in a declarative form. Such externalized descriptions in ontological format are used for purposes ranging from search and retrieval to information integration and to service composition (RDF Projects, 2004; OWL Tools, 2004). Ontologies could significantly reduce the costs of deploying, integrating, and maintaining enterprise systems. The barrier to more widespread use of ontologies for such applications is the lack of support in the currently available middleware stacks used in enterprise computing. This chapter presents our work on developing an enterprise-scale ontology management system that will provide APIs and query languages, and scalability and performance that enterprise applications demand. We describe the design and implementation of the management system that programmatically supports the ontology needs of enterprise applications in a similar way to a database management system supporting the data needs of applications. In addition, we present a novel approach to representing ontologies in relational database tables to address the scalability and performance issues. The state of the art ontology management systems are either memory-based or use ad-hoc solutions for persisting data, and so provide limited scalability.