Extending SQOWL: OWL reasoning in relational databases

Objective

To improve on the existing SQOWL tool that translates OWL ontologies into relational databases, such the capabilites of OWL reasoners are implemented within the relational database.

Description

SQOWL is a Java based prototype system for implementing reasoning over OWL-DL ontologies in a transaction based relational database system. The existing prototype has demonstrated proof of concept for the approach, and has been benchmarked to demonstrate that it supports comparable reasoning speeds with other approaches based on storing ontology data in a relational database. This project is to reimplement (or at least refactor) SQOWL to have the following capabilities:

• Support OWL 2 ontologies (the current prototype only supports OWL 1).
• Support a mapping to a more conventional relational database schema format, rather than the current approach of mapping all OWL classes to unary relations and all OWL properties to binary relations
• Develop a tool to support round-trip mapping of OWL ontologies to relational databases and back again. The objective is to allow changes in OWL ontologies to be reflected in changes in relational database schemas, and vice versa

There will be a PhD award available for students in the general area of Data Integration from October 2011, in which work on this work could be continued to PhD level.

References

• P.J. McBrien, N. Rizopoulos, and A.C. Smith,
  SQOWL: Type Inference in an RDBMS (PostScript)
  Proceedings of ER10
• P.J. McBrien, N. Rizopoulos, and A.C. Smith
  SQOWL: Performing OWL-DL type inference in SQL
  AutoMed Technical Report No 37