Integration Strategy and Tool between Formal Ontology and Graph Database Technology

Abstract

Ontologies, and especially formal ones, have traditionally been investigated as a means to formalize an application domain so as to carry out automated reasoning on it. The union of the terminological part of an ontology and the corresponding assertional part is known as a Knowledge Graph. On the other hand, database technology has often focused on the optimal organization of data so as to boost efficiency in their storage, management and retrieval. Graph databases are a recent technology specifically focusing on element-driven data browsing rather than on batch processing. While the complementarity and connections between these technologies are patent and intuitive, little exists to bring them to full integration and cooperation. This paper aims at bridging this gap, by proposing an intermediate format that can be easily mapped onto the formal ontology on one hand, so as to allow complex reasoning, and onto the graph database on the other, so as to benefit from efficient data handling.