Re: Ontology recommendation for Object-Relationship Mapping

mKR/mKE is a language/program [http://mkrmke.org/]
which will serve your needs.  User-defined methods
give you full flexibility in defining your transformations.
You can prototype using mKR, and implement any
time-critical methods in Unicon [http://unicon.sourceforge.net/].

Dick McCullough
http://mkrmke.org
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jesse Wang" <JesseW@vulcan.com>
To: <semantic-web@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 2:14 PM
Subject: Ontology recommendation for Object-Relationship Mapping


> Dear all -
>
> I am a beginner in ontology world, and I am looking for a good ontology 
> for general object relationship mapping, i.e., mapping properties/fields 
> in tables, forms, templates, or objects in general. By "good" I mean: it 
> is simple (relative to expressive power), easy to use, easy to understand, 
> and popular (say other people are using it or at least know something 
> about). I don't want to invent something of my own:).
>
> The user scenarios generally involves mapping between template or 
> form-generated objects. For example:
>
> Having a "Member" form and we want to define a mapping to 
> translate/transform it into a "Person" form.
>
> The fields in "Member" and "Person" will be different, containing a "Name" 
> (can be a whole field or separate fields such as First, Middle, Last names 
> etc.) and phone numbers (such as mobile, work, home phone numbers etc.) 
> and so on.
>
> I want to be able to map, say Person.FirstName + <space> + Person.LastName 
> ==> Member.(Full)Name, and Member.BusinessPhone ==> Person.DayTimePhone, 
> Member.HomePhone ==>Person.EveningPhone or "Person.PhoneList[1]", 
> Person.PhoneList[2] as an array. I also want to specify which fields are 
> optional vs. mandatory; and it'll be nice to support structure (hierarchy) 
> and meta-data mapping or conversion, say from a "Date" type to a 
> "DateTime" type conversion or to a "String" type coercion, and so on. One 
> thing I need or at least prefer is to support "functions" in converting, 
> mapping the fields, as in the example above of name, it can also be 
> parsing a full US address into separate components such as street, city, 
> state, postal code and so on... so the function is a mapping predicate in 
> this scenario.
>
> A more involved scenario will be the capability to specify some rules or 
> restrictions such as cardinality and/or priority to map fields, e.g., from 
> all phone numbers (i.e. a list of Person's phone numbers) to one phone 
> number, with priority fill the first non-empty number in a the list. But 
> this is only something nicer to have.
>
> I found 
> http://www.fedora-commons.org/definitions/1/0/fedora-relsext-ontology.rdfs 
> meets some of my requirements in that it describes the relationship 
> between objects, but it is more for _describing_ the relationship than 
> mapping or construction. OWL and RDFS to me only for describing too, at an 
> even more abstract and theoretic level to be useful.
>
> If you have any questions on why I need it and what I need do, please feel 
> free to ask me.
>
> Any tips or comments are appreciated.
>
> Jesse Wang
> Vulcan Inc.
> 505 5th Ave. S, Suite 900
> Seattle, WA 98104
> Direct Phone: (206) 342-2306
> Direct Fax: (206) 342-3306
> Mobile: (206) 295-6316
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 21 August 2009 22:45:57 UTC