Method for supporting ontology-related semantic queries in DBMSs with XML support

摘要

A method for supporting semantic matching queries in a database management system (DBMS) by extracting and storing the transitive/subsumption relationships from a given ontology data in a DBMS with native XML support. These transitive relationships are transformed into a set of XML documents that are natural mappings of the hierarchical structure of the transitive relationships. A table function construct expresses semantic matching queries in a declarative manner. The semantic matching queried are automatically rewritten or translated into standard SQL/XML search operators such as XQuery, XPath and XMLExists, and executed by the SQL/XML DBMS on the given instance data and the extracted transitive relationships data.