Using Assertion Capabilities of an OWL-Based Ontology for Query Formulation

This paper reports on the development of a framework to assist users in formulating relational queries without requiring a complete knowledge of the information structure and access mechanisms to underlying data sources. The emphasis here is on exploiting the semantic relationships and assertion capabilities of OWL ontologies to assist clinicians in writing complex queries. This has been achieved using both a bottom-up and top-down approaches to build an ontology model to be the repository for complex end user queries. Relational database schemas are mapped into the newly generated ontology schema to reinforce the current domain ontology being developed. One of the key merits of this approach is that it does not require storing data interpretation, with the added advantage of even not storing database instances as part of the domain ontology, especially for systems with huge volume of data.