Tarek Bourbia and Mahmoud Boufaida, University Constantine 2, Algeria

The storing and the processing of OWL instances are important subjects in database modeling. Many research works have focused on the way of managing OWL instances efficiently. Some systems store and manage OWL instances using relational models to ensure their persistence. Nevertheless, several approaches keep only RDF triplets as instances in relational tables explicitly, and the manner of structuring instances as graph and keeping links between concepts is not taken into account. In this paper, we propose an architecture that permits relational tables behave as an OWL model by adapting relational tables to OWL instances and an OWL hierarchy structure. Therefore, two kinds of tables are used: facts or instances relational tables. The tables hold instances and the OWL table holds a specification of how the concepts are structured. Instances tables should conform to OWLtable to be valid. A mechanism of construction of OWLtable and instances tables is defined in order to enable and enhance inference and semantic querying of OWL in relational model context.

Relational Model, Database, OWL, Instance, Fact, Ontology