Tuesday, 5/22/2007
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Level: Technical - Introductory

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.

Melli Annamalai has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is part of the Semantic Technologies development group as a Principal Member of Technical Staff. Projects she has worked on at Oracle include semantic operator support in the database and using semantic technology to enhance image metadata based search. She is a member of the W3c Multimedia Semantics Incubator Group. Her responsibilities with the development group include understanding customer requirements and helping them use Oracle Database Semantic technology in their applications.

Xavier Lopez is Director of Oracle's Spatial and RDF technologies group. Xavier leads Oracle's efforts to incorporate spatial and semantic technologies across Oracle's database technologies. He has eighteen years of experience in the area of GIS and spatial databases. He holds advanced engineering and planning degrees from University of Maine, MIT, and the University of California, Davis. Xavier has been active in numerous academic and government research initiatives on geographic information. He is the author of a book on government spatial information policy and has authored over 100 scientific and industry publications in areas related to spatial information technology.