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Database and Ontology

Background: This is a community-driven set of activities, and is probably long overdue. On 15-Aug-2006, Tatiana Malyuta (who just joined the community after participating at our 23-Jul-2006 face-to-face workshop at Stanford, brought up her request for the Ontolog community to delve into the subject of "Database and Ontologiy." An almost unprecedented flurry of online responses were received from the members. It was decided that we could systematically pursue the subject by mounting a min-series on the matter at hand. One can view this as a project, although the conversation and the learning will probably be open-ended. ... This, now, is the 'project' home page for our treatment of "Database and Ontology."

Dr. Matthew West was invited to lead the effort, and did a marvelous job championing the community's collaborative exploration of the subject matter. Started out as a mini-series of monthly event, for say, about six (6) months, the effort has now spanned more than 15 months and has produced twelve (12) virtual events. To recognize this enthusiasm, we started calling this the "Database and Ontology" series (rather than "mini-series") as of 2007/Q4.

In order to allow us to fully explore the landscape of the intersection between databases and ontologies, we will be inviting some vendors to join us in the effort. Under those circumstances, we will temporarily waive the community's IPR policy and accept the presentation of proprietary technology or product (under the said waiver), so that we can all get a chance to fully appreciate what the true state-of-the-art is, whether open or proprietary.

The Plan / The Team

Meeting & Event

  • 2008.01.24 - Thursday, 24-Jan-2008 - Dr. Matthew West presented the 12th and final session of the Ontolog "Database And Ontology" series - Dr. Holger Knublauch, Vice President for product development at TopQuadrant was our invited speaker for the event. Dr. Knublauch gave a talk entitled: "Information Integration Intelligence with Semantic Technology." Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2008_01_24 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.10.18 - Thursday, 18-Oct-2007 - Dr. Matthew West and Dr. Leo Obrst presented the 11th session in the "Database And Ontology" series - Dr. Alan Wu from Oracle's Database Semantic Technologies Group was our invited speaker. This is the second of the two-part presentation from Oracle and was focused more on Oracle's OWL Inferencing implementation. Dr. Wu's talk was entitled: "A Scalable RDBMS-Based Inference Engine for RDFS/OWL." Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_10_18 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.07.12 - Thursday, 12-Jul-2007 - Dr. Susie Stephens and Dr. Matthew West presented the 10th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Dr. John Sowa from VivoMind Intelligence was be our invited speaker. Dr. Sowa gave a talk on: "Analogical Reasoning With and About Databases and Knowledge Bases". Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_07_12 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.07.05 - Thursday, 05-Jul-2007 - Dr. Matthew West presented the 9th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Chris Partridge from the BORO Center, UK was our invited speaker. He gave a talk on "Data and process revisited: ontology driving a paradigm shift in the development of business application systems." ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_07_05 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.06.28 - Thursday, 28-Jun-2007 - We had the 8th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - The session was co-chaired by Dr. Matthew West and Dr. Susie Stephens. Dr. Souripriya Das and Dr. Melliyal Annamalai from Oracle were their invited speakers who gave a talk on: "Building Database Infrastructure for Managing Semantic Data". ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_06_28 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.05.10 - Thursday, 10-May-2007 - Dr. Matthew West will be presenting the 7th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Professor Tatiana Malyuta from the City University of New York was our invited speaker and gave a talk on "Interaction of Ontology and Database in the Information System" ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_05_10 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.04.12 - Thursday, 12-April-2007 - Dr. Matthew West presented the 6th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Mr. Edward Barkmeyer from NIST was our invited speaker and gave a talk on "Ontologies as the Next Generation Information Models" ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_04_12 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.03.08 - Thursday, 8-March-2007 - Dr. Matthew West presented the 5th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Dr. Adrian Walker, CTO of Reengineering LLC., was our invited speaker. He gave a talk on "Usability, Databases and Ontologies" ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_03_08 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.02.08 - Thursday, 8-February-2007 - Dr. Matthew West presented the 4th Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Mr. Martin O'Connor, an EHR Systems Researcher from Stanford Medical Informatics gave an invited talk on "Efficiently Querying Relational Databases using OWL and SWRL" ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_02_08 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2007.01.04 - Thursday, 4-January-2007 - we presented the 3rd Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Ms. Elisa Kendall, CEO and Founder of Sandpiper Software was our invited speaker again. She presented a talk on "The Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM): Motivation & Brief Introduction" ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2007_01_04 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2006.11.16 - Thursday, 16-November-2006 - we will be presenting the 2nd Event in the "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series - Dr. Matthew West (Reference Data Architecture and Standards Manager of Shell International Petroleum Company Limited) presented his invited talk entitled: "From Ontology to Data Model: Choices and Design Decisions" as the 2nd session in the Ontolog "Database and Ontology" mini-series ... Please refer to details at the session wiki page, at: ConferenceCall_2006_11_16 ... Audio archives of the session is now available!   
  • 2006.10.12 - Thursday, October 12, 2006 - Ontolog "Database And Ontology" Mini-Series Kick-off Session - Moderator / Panelists: Dr. Matthew West (Shell), Dr. Tatiana Malyuta (CUNY) & Dr. Leo Obrst (MITRE) ... Please refer to details on the session page at: ConferenceCall_2006_10_12 ... Audio archive of the session is now available!   

Project Workspace

  • Project wiki homepage (this page) - http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DatabaseAndOntology
  • Discussion Forum - please continue to use the [ontolog-forum] as the conversation and discussion workspace for the time being.
  • Shared-File Workspace: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/DatabaseAndOntology/
  • The possibility of a collaboratively authored deliverable:
    • The community is requested to contribute their thoughts by posting to [ontolog-forum] or to the DatabaseAndOntology wiki page (and/or its subpages). We hope to accumulate and synthesize the knowledge gathered and compile it into a written deliverable (a paper or even a handbook) that we could publish to other relevant media and channels (like relevant conferences or the wikipedia.)

Discussion

  • /Issues
http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/DatabaseAndOntology/Ontology-and-Databases-Landscape--MatthewWest_20060901a.png
I used Matthew's landscape diagram (above) and tried to present a general functional diagram of an Information System with Ontology and Database as the main components.
http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/DatabaseAndOntology/Ontology-and-Databases-Landscape-MW0609011a_comment-2a_-TatianaMalyuta_20060918.png
I have a somewhat different feeling about some relationships between the nodes of the Landscape diagram:
1. Ontology is a formal representation of Information Requirements and the relationship between these two nodes is maybe Presented rather than About.
2. Human Computer Interface, as well as Computer Computer Interface and different applications (e.g. integration and reuse) have to be working with ontological presentation and not with the database directly. Some of the requests may be further directed to the database.

Resource & Reference