Querying ontology based databases. The OntoQL proposal

Abstract

Several approaches for storing ontologies and their instances in databases have been proposed. As a consequence, the need of defining languages to query such ontology based databases (OBDB) appeared. In this paper, we present OntoQL, an ontology query language designed for OBDB databases. This paper particulary emphasizes on the language constructs. Several query examples showing the interest of this language compared to traditional database query languages are given. Finally, we overview the proposed OntoQL implementation on a prototype of OBDB.