Ontologies And Databases: Going Back And Forth

Interoperability of ontologies and databases has received a lot of attention recently. However, most of the work has concentrated on specific problems (such as storing an ontology in a database or making database data available to ontologies) and referred to specific models for each of the two. Here we propose an approach that aims at being more general and model independent. In fact, it works for different dialects for ontologies and for various data models for databases. Also, it supports translations in both directions (ontologies to databases and vice versa) and it allows for flexibility in the translations, so that customization is possible. The proposal extends recent work for schema and data translation (the MIDST project, which implements the ModelGen operator proposed in model management), which relies on a metamodel approach, where data models and variations thereof are described in a common framework and translations are built as compositions of elementary ones.