Database Infrastructure for the Semantic Web

Oracle Database has support for native storage, querying and inference of semantic datasets containing hundreds of millions to billions of triples. This scalable and secure infrastructure can be used to build applications for data integration, metadata (knowledge) representation, ontology usage and management, ontology enhanced search, and so on. Several new features have been added to the database infrastructure support:

• Native inferencing for a part of OWL (basic constructs, property characteristics, class comparisons, individual comparisons, and class expressions),
• A bulk-load facility for fast loading of large amounts of triple data into the database, and
• New SQL semantic operators to enhance the query of relational data using ontologies.

These features are SQL-based (with a SPARQL-like graph pattern-based query interface), resulting in several advantages:

• Scalability of a database for semantic data,
• Tight integration with other relational data enabling combined queries,
• Ability to process the results of a semantic query with SQL constructs, and
• Database benefits of security, concurrency, transaction control, robustness, availability, etc. for semantic data. We will describe the features and highlight the benefits of a database infrastructure.