ONTOLOGY FOR DATABASE DESIGN AND APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

摘要

A system and method lets a user create or import ontologies and create databases and related application software. These databases can be specially tuned to suit a particular need, and each comes with the same error-detection rules to keep the data clean. Ontology management (11) and generation tools (12) enable enterprises to create databases that use ontologies (10) to improve data integration, maintainability, quality, and flexibility. Only the relevant aspects of the ontology (10) are targeted, extracting out a sub-model that has the power of the full ontology (10) restricted to objects of interest for the application domain. To increase performance and add desired database characteristics, this sub-model is translated into a database system. Java-based object-oriented and relational application program interfaces (APIs) (15) are then generated from this translation, providing application developers with an API (15) that exactly reflects the entity types and relations (classes and methods) that are represented by the database.