An ontological approach for SQL query expansion

The semantic poverty of traditional database management systems prevents them from satisfying the increasing needs of users. With the advent of ontologies, an important progress has been done with the explicit representation of data semantics with data. In this paper, we are interested in the use of domain ontologies as a semantic enrichment for traditional databases. Our first aim is to help the user in his search when his initial query doesn´t return any result. So, we propose an ontological approach for SQL query expansion based on different refinement types. Our approach is described by a generic algorithm that can be used with any traditional database.