Re: [topbraid-users] Some basic questions about implementing Ontology

[Scott Henninger]

Qadeer; Irene is correct that the response is highly dependent on what you would like to achieve.  A hallmark of semantic web technologies is the flexibility it affords for different architectural approaches. For 1, at the minimum you will need to create a mapping from relational to RDF.  This is accomplished through TopBraid Composer's D2RQ wizard (see Help > Import and Export > Import external information > Importing Relational Databases with D2RQ).  This will get you a full mapping of the relational database where each table is a class, each foreign key is an object property, and all other columns are datatype properties.  The 3.6.0 wizard also allows you to inspect your relational model and choose which parts you need to map to RDF.  There are also refinements that can be done through the D2RQ mapping language, and you can read more about that in the Help files (or ask us). When finished, you will have a connector to the relational database that can be treated as though it contained RDF data.  The mapping will take care of getting the data from your relational sources.  This connector can be imported by other RDF data or connectors or vice-versa.  You can also create modeling structures over the mappings.  We cover this extensively in our advanced product training (see below). 2. Yes. 3. The advantages depend on what kind of application you need to build.  D2RQ mappings are often used when the relational data has an existing infrastructure that will modify the data independent of your semantic web application or the size of the data is too large for current RDF triple stores.  On the other hand, many semantic web operations, such as OWL inferencing, require that data be in memory.  Therefore some data engineering is often necessary.  E.g. you may want to convert some of your data into RDF and keep that in memory to speed up operations. A key reason to want your data in RDF is that it becomes easy to integrate it with other data types, such as spreadsheets, XML, UML, RSS, RDFa, microformats, etc.  Once you have the relational mapping (D2RQ) you can immediately take advantage of this. 4. Irene's response gave some general use cases.  We have many customers that access sets of relational data and process them in RDF in various ways.  In most cases, the project using TopBraid Live need data from a few tables from a set of relational databases that are housed and maintained by some other part of the organization.  The wizard in Composer is used to create and initial mapping and refine that to get the data in the format desired.  It is then integrated with other ontologies, usually imported to an ontology that models the data in ways that the relational models cannot.  The model (combination of RDF/RDFS/OWL and relational connectors) are then uploaded to a TopBraid Live server with a TopBraid Ensemble or SWP-based interface.  The interface to the data is often a custom API created with Web services.  The services are backed by a SPARQLMotion script that queries and process data in response to a request and returns data in XML, JSON, HTML, SPARQL endpoint result set (variant of XML) or other text format. <<I appologize in advance ifor my minimal knowledge about this realm of Ontology... >> We have been doing training in semantic technologies for a decade now and have found that participants enjoy a much higher level of success and reduced learning curves.  We now can boast having some 'children' of the process in that some of our participants have begun to do internal tutorials based on our training.  It is really highly, strongly, recommended for any organization interested in adopting semantic web technologies. ---- Scott Henninger, PhD Platform Product Manager, Senior Product and Training Engineer TopQuadrant, Inc., tel: 402-429-3751 / fax: 703 991-8192 / main: 703 299-9330 Training:    Introduction to Semantic Web Technologies - March. 5-8, 2012, Washington, DC    TopBraid Advanced Products Training - May 21-24, 2012, Washington, DC    Introduction to Semantic Web Technologies - April 24-26, 2012, New York, NY TQ Blog: Voyages of the Semantic Enterprise On 3/23/12 9:19 AM, Qadeer Khan wrote: Hello all,   Recently we are asked to look into using Ontology as it is becoming a big buzzword in DoD for our project and I am not sure as how and where we can start and also to  justify.  Here is the scenario we are in:   Ours is a service orineted architecure where we get data from several sources and  store it in SQLServer RDMBS (not tripple store). Into the database and out of the database we have web services  to consume and expose data ( rudimentary explanation of our architecture) Now we need to see how can we leverage the  ontology concepts.   1. Do we need to create Ontology for our data structures and then migrate data from our current DB to triple store?   2. Can we keep our current RDBMS and use Ontology (tripple store) as an added layer?   3. If there is an advantage of using 1 over 2 or vice versa?   4. Is there an example or case study for some one has gone through a similar situation.   I appologize in advance ifor my minimal knowledge about this realm of Ontology...   Appreciate any response on this..   Regards Qadeer   -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Group "TopBraid Suite Users", the topics of which include Enterprise Vocabulary Network (EVN), TopBraid Composer, TopBraid Live, TopBraid Ensemble, SPARQLMotion and SPIN. 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