Re: OWL ontology database

Is neo4j http://neo4j.org a good option to consider for this ? does it
provide seamless integration with dbpedia, free base etc?



On 6/19/11, Marco Brandizi <brandizi@ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi Aliabbas,
>
> It all depends on what you want to represent and which tasks you want to
> perform.
> OWL-based models (and RDF/OWL triplestores) are useful when you have
> heterogeneous data, for which you cannot define a schema a-priori (eg,
> http://dc-research.eu/, OBI ontology).
> OWL modelling can add useful inference capabilities to traditional OO or
> relational modelling (eg, find automatically that the brother of my dad
> is my uncle).
> RDF/OWL world are particularly interesting if you want to integrate your
> data with similar knowledge, which is increasingly being exported via
> http and via RDF/OWL (ie, linked data, see eg, DBpedia, Freebase).
> Relational DBs are useful to back object models (so, schema-based
> models), you may want to consider NoSQL and Document-based stores too.
> Exporting OWL from existing DB may make sense either, especially when
> you have well-defined entities (ie, a schema), that you annotate with
> ontologies or alike (eg, biomedical records, annotated with biomedical
> ontologies, like MESH or GeneOntology).
>
> Also, keep in mind that in the case of OWL modelling you will typically
> need to change your mindset completely. While a relational (or OO)
> database is a closed dataset, which defines all (and only) the known
> facts extesively, an OWL-based knowledge base is an open knowledge base,
> where only what is known is defined by means of logical statements,
> keeping the unknown as unknown, not as "not true", or "not existing".
> For instance, in OWL it's difficult to establish that person1 and
> person2 are two different individuals, cause usually nothing excludes
> that they are the same real thing. Most straightforward way is to
> explicitly say that they are owl:differentFrom (but, you need to do it
> for all the pairs) and this is obviously different than a relational DB,
> where two tuples are usually considered different by default (OWL-2 has
> introduced identifier properties, but not sure they work so great). As
> another example, it's difficult to use OWL for enforcing the equivalent
> of relational integrity. For example, you may say that an employee must
> have one boss, but this is an axiom, something that can be used to infer
> that employee1 has such boss and we can call him/her emp1Boss. You
> cannot say your KB is inconsistent just because you cannot find an
> explicit declaration of a boss for an employee in that KB, ie, it may
> have been declared somewhere else (or nowhere, but it still holds true
> in reality). People often make confusion on this sort of things. For
> instance, when one says that every protein has a standard international
> name (it happens they do that in OWL), they actually mean that every
> identified and classified protein that has a record in some
> international biological database, has also an associated name in that
> DB. That doesn't exclude proteins that exist, even if we know them and
> we haven't named them yet. This comes from the fact that "has-name" is
> not an inherent property of a protein, in the same sense "has-father" is
> for a living being, since the former is just a conventional requirement
> for the representation of the real thing.
>
> Hope it helps.
>
> Marco.
>
>
>
> On 18/06/2011 08:04, Aliabbas Petiwala wrote:
>> we are looking forward to make an OWL ontology database as a mirror of
>> a relational database for an upcoming social network semantic website
>> is it a good decision to make?
>>
>> actually we can go for three options:
>>
>> 1. complete owl database, no relational db
>> 2. owl mirror of relational db
>> 3. only relational
>>
>> we are very much interested in the second option   is it wise to use
>> mirror of ontology database as a relation database? how can owL
>> Ontology database be efficient than a relational one considering that
>> we will need to query a lot of external databases like
>> dbpedia,freebase etc?
>>
>> for the second option,  ontological databases requires us to make a
>> query against hundreds of different schemata and classes properties
>> which seems to be a costly affair. And is it a wise decision to go for
>> a complete ontological database for a social networking website ? The
>> project is involves sharing of lot of small chunks of information
>> across an array of distributed users building a personalized model of
>> the user.
>>
>> ontotext, http://www.systap.com,http://www.opencalais.com/ provides a
>> solution for semantic repositories , its really difficult to determine
>> which is the best option for a STARTUP like us and we can't go in for
>> these expensive paid consultations. so what are the options and
>> solutions availaible for us?
>>
>>
>
> --
>
> ===============================================================================
> Marco Brandizi<brandizi@ebi.ac.uk>
>
> Microarray Group - Sr Software Engineer
> http://www.ebi.ac.uk/microarray
>
> European Bioinformatics Institute
> Hinxton, CB10 1SD, United Kingdom
> Office A3141
>
> Tel.: +44 (0)1223 492 613
> Fax: +44 (0)1223 492 620
>
> http://www.marcobrandizi.info
>
>


-- 
Aliabbas Petiwala
M.Tech CSE

Received on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 11:19:54 UTC