Object Relational Description Language (ORDL)

Folks,

I am sending an abstract of a document that we are working on to pique your
interest. I would be interested to hear from folks who would like to work
with us on this. We have a very, very preliminary draft of the document.
But, what we do have is a query engine that leverages the ORDL language to
support exploration of structured information. Interested? Let me know.

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Object Relational Description Language (ORDL)

Abstract

Object Relational Description Language (ORDL) addresses the need to describe
and represent information objects and relationships between them such that
automated agents or users could perform guided exploration over the
information described by ORDL. ORDL is used by content providers to
explicitly describe and represent information objects and relationships of
various kinds starting from primitive types all the way up to complex,
networked structures. We expect ORDL to help enable a semantic web that
supports more intuitive exploration and evaluation.

Background and Motivation

The need to describe information objects and relationships between them is
well recognized. The field of knowledge representation, modeling languages
for databases, and ontology representation efforts has tried to address this
need. Resource Description Framework (RDF)  is one response to addressing a
part of this need. While RDF focuses on describing relationships between
resources, ORDL focuses on describing information objects and representing
relationships between them. While RDF is relationship centric, ORDL is
information object centric. Furthermore, while RDF uses a relational model
that allows world wide scalability by allowing anonymous definitions of
relationships over information resources, ORDL is targeted more for
describing objects and relationships by parties that control (directly or
indirectly) information objects that they are trying to relate. While RDF is
ideally suited for describing information about web sites or applications
that one does not own or control - i.e., not under ones administrative
control, ORDL is ideally suited for describing relationships between
information objects that is under one's administrative control. RDF's data
model starts from relationships (tuples) on top of which type and other
constraints are added, while ORDL data model starts from a traditional
object oriented data model and relaxes it to deal with semi-structured
nature of information found on the Web. Furthermore, while RDF is about
meta-data, ORDL is about describing meta-data and representing instances of
data that follow the specification of the meta-data. Because of this, ORDL
uses XML-Schema  as its serialization representation.

ORDL Data Model Introduction

Features, Categories, Types, and Entries

The ORDL data consists of typed features that are loosely organized into a
heterarchy of categories. Features may belong to multiple categories and
features may exist without ever being part of a category. A category can
optionally be designated as a child of one or more other categories. Child
categories inherit features associated with their ancestor categories.
Additionally, ORDL uses a reflective model. Hence, its schema (i.e., meta
data) descriptions can be extended the same way instances are extended.

Received on Saturday, 29 April 2000 18:35:07 UTC