Unifying data and domain knowledge using virtual views

Abstract

The database community is on a constant quest for better integration of data management and knowledge management. Recently, with the increasing use of ontology in various applications, the quest has become more concrete and urgent. However, manipulating knowledge along with relational data in DBMSs is not a trivial undertaking. In this paper, we introduce a novel, unified framework for managing data and domain knowledge. We provide the user with a virtual view that unifies the data, the domain knowledge and the knowledge inferable from the data using the domain knowledge. Because the virtual view is in the relational format, users can query the data and the knowledge in a seamlessly integrated manner. To facilitate knowledge representation and inferencing within the database engine, our approach leverages XML support in hybrid relational-XML DBMSs (e.g., Microsoft SQL Server & IBM DB2 9 PureXML). We provide a query rewriting mechanism to bridge the difference between logical and physical data modeling, so that queries on the virtual view can be automatically transformed to components that execute on the hybrid relational-XML engine in a way that is transparent to the user.