Ontology management for large-scale enterprise systems

Semantic markup languages such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) [Resource Description Framework (RDF), http://www.w3.org/RDF/] and OWL (Web Ontology Language) [Web Ontology Language (OWL), http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/] are increasingly being used to externalize meta-data 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 [Resource Description Framework (RDF): Projects and Applications, http://w3c.org/RDF/#projects, Web Ontology Language (OWL): Tools, Projects and Applications, http://w3c.org/2004/OWL/#projects]. Ontologies could significantly reduce the costs of deploying, integrating and maintaining enterprise systems. The barrier to more wide-spread use of ontologies for such applications is the lack of support in the currently available middleware stacks used in enterprise computing. This paper 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 a database management system supports 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.