
What if ... you could define and query an Ontology using natural language?
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Tonight as an experiment I connected my NLP engine to my MongoDB
triple-store and built a reasoner that does simple-entailment over just
RDFS:subClassOf and OWL:disjointWith

Try it out at http://nlp.abodit.com/demo/demo

Ignore the instructions on the right and try building a simple ontology,

Start by creating some root level class:

car is a class

Now expand it:

```markup
	a BMW is a car
	an Audi is a car
	what is a BMW 
	*BMW is a car*
	what is an Audi
	*Audi is a car*
	is an Audi a BMW
	*I don't know, under the open world assumption it could be*
	an Audi is not a BMW
	is an Audi a BMW *No*
```

Simple but promising.


What if ... you could define and query an Ontology using natural language?


There are many references in the literature to exposing existing SQL
data sources as RDF. This is certainly one way to integrate existing
databases with semantic reasoning tools but it clearly requires a lot
more storage and processing than simply keeping the data in SQL and
querying over it directly. So recently I began some experiments to
create a hybrid store by merging an ontology triple (quad) store with an
existing database. By linking each row in other SQL tables to an Entity
in the triple store I can take advantage of their existing columns,
indexes, relationships etc. whilst also being able to reason over them.
The first part of this is now working, Entities can be derived types
stored in separate SQL tables linked only by an Id, and I am now moving
on to getting the metadata in place that will provide all of the implied
relationships that can be derived from an existing row-structured
database into the ontology store - not as duplicated information but as
a service that the reasoner will use to get statements about the SQL
content. Clearly this will require changes in both the reasoner and the
store but I think the net effect will be a much more efficient reasoner
able to reason over large volumes of structured information quickly
without having to first turn everything into a statement triple.


The Blog of Ian Mercer.

Topic: ontology

What if ... you could define and query an Ontology using natural language?

Hybrid Ontology + Relational Store with SQL Server