Abstract
It is well-accepted that there is a need to incorporate domain knowledge into system development tools of various kinds. Most of these are case tools that have been quite successful in supporting design on a syntactical basis. However, in general, they are not capable of representing and using information about the semantics of an application domain. This research presents a framework for supporting the generation and analysis of conceptual database designs through the use of ontologies. The framework is implemented in a database design assistant prototype that illustrates the research results.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alter, S. Information Systems: A Management Perspective. Addison-Wesley, 1999.
Bergholtz, M., Johannesson, “Classifying the Semantics of Relationships in Conceptual Modeling by Categorization of Roles,” Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB’01), Madrid, Spain, June 28–29, 2001, pp. 199–203.
Braga, R., Mattoso, M., Werner, C. “The Use of Mediation and Ontology Technologies for Software Component Information Retrieval,” Proceedings of SSR’01, May 18-20, Toronto, Canada, 2001, pp. 19–28.
Chiang, R.H.L, Barron, T., and Storey, V.C. “Reverse Engineering of Relational Databases: Extraction of an EER Model from a Relational Database,” Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vol.12, No.2, March 1994, pp.107–142.
Dahlgren, K. “A Linguistic Ontology,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol.43, 1995, pp.809–818.
Dennis, A. and Wixom, B. H. Systems Analysis and Design. John Wiley, 2000.
Embley, D., Campbell, D.M., Jiang, Y.S., Ng, Y.K., Smith, R.D., Liddle, S.W. “A conceptual-modeling approach to web data extraction,” Data & Knowledge Engineering, 1999.
Fensel, D., Harmelen, F.v., Horrocks, I., McGuinness, D.L. and Patel-Schneider, P.F. “OIL: An Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web,” IEEE Intelligent Systems (March/April), 2001, pp. 38–45.
Friedman-Hill, E. Jess, the Expert System Shell, Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore, CA, 2002. URL: http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/jess
Hendler, J. “Agents and the Semantic Web,” IEEE Intelligent Systems (March/April), 2001, pp. 30–36.
Johannesson, P. “A Method for Transforming Relational Schemas into Conceptual Schemas,” Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Data Engineering, February 1994, pp. 190–201.
Kedad, Z., and Metais, E., “Dealing with Semantic Heterogeneity During Data Integration,” in Akoka, J., Bouzeghoub, M., Comyn-Wattiau, I., and Metais, E. (eds.), Conceptual Modeling-ER’99, 18th Intl. Conference on Conceptual Modeling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1728, Paris, France, 15-18 November 1999, pp.325–339.
Lenat, D.B. “CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure,” Communications of the ACM (38:11), 1995, pp. 33–41.
Perez, A.G. and Benjamin, V.R. “Overview of Knowledge Sharing and Reuse Components: Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods,” Proceedings of the IJCAI-99 workshop on Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods (KRR5), Stockholm, Sweden, 1999
Sowa, J.F., “Ontology, metadata, and semiotics,” in B. Ganter & G. W. Mineau, eds., Conceptual Structures: Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues, Lecture Notes in AI #1867, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000, pp. 55–81.
Stephens, L.M. and Huhns, M.N. “Consensus Ontologies: Reconciling the Semantics of Web Pages and Agents,” IEEE Internet Computing (September-October), 2001, pp. 92–95.
Storey, V.C., Goldstein, R.C., Chiang, R.H.L., Dey, D., and Sundaresan, S., “Database Design with Common Sense Business Reasoning and Learning,” ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol.22, No.4, December, 1997, pp.471–512.
Sugumaran, V., Storey, V. “Ontologies for conceptual modeling: Their creation, use, and management,” Data and Knowledge Engineering, 2002(forthcoming).
Swartout, A.T., “Ontologies,” IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications, 1999.
Teorey, T.J., Yang, D. and Fry, J.P. “A Logical Design Methodology for Relational Databases Using the Extended Entity-Relationship Model,” ACM Computing Surveys (18:2), 1986, pp. 197–222.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sugumaran, V., Storey, V.C. (2002). An Ontology-Based Framework for Generating and Improving Database Design. In: Andersson, B., Bergholtz, M., Johannesson, P. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2553. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36271-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36271-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00307-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36271-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive