Recently, ontologies have been widely adopted by small, medium and large companies in various domains. Theyhave become central components in many applications. These models conceptualize the universe of discourse by means ofprimitive and sometimes redundant concepts (derived from primitive concepts). At first, the relationship between ontologiesand database was loosely coupled. With the explosion of semantic data, persistence solutions providing high performanceapplications have been proposed. As a consequence, a new type of database, called ontology-based database (OBDB) isborn. Several types of OBDB have been proposed including different architectures of the target DBMS and storage modelsfor ontologies and their instances. At this stage, the relationship between databases and ontologies becomes strongly coupled.As a result, several research studies have been proposed on the physical design phase of OBDB. Conceptual and logicalphases were only partially treated. To ensure similar success to that known by relational databases, OBDB must beaccompanied by design methodologies and tools dealing with the different stages of the life cycle of a database. Such amethodology should identify the redundancy built into the ontology. In our work, we propose a design methodologydedicated to ontology-based databases including the main phases of the lifecycle of the database development: conceptual,logical and physical as well as the deployment phase. The logical design phase is performed thanks to the incorporation ofdependencies between concepts and properties of the ontologies. These dependencies are quite similar to the functionaldependencies in traditional databases. Due to the diversity of the OBDB architectures and the variety of the used storagemodels (triplet, horizontal, etc.) to store and manage ontological data, we propose a deployment ‘à la carte. To validate ourproposal, an implementation of our approach in an OBDB environment on OntoDB is proposed. Finally, in order to supportthe user during the design process, a tool for designing databases from a conceptual ontology is presented.
Contribution to the definition of a mathod for designing an ontology-based database