[Zeusagent-developer] Db to Ontology

[Jaron C. <jar...@se...>]

Hmmmm,

My last message seems to have been lost in the ether.
So I'll repeat it...

My plan is to use JDBC metadata rather than a SQL parser to implement
the Db-to-Ontology mechanism.

The general idea is to do a "select * from sometable", load the results into
a ResultSet and then use the ResultSetMetaData to create the matching
ontology concepts.

Of course this assumes that persistent data originates from outside the
ontology
editor, but I think that's always going to be the case anyway. Db's have
much
better data modelling tools than we can ever hope to build.

So, first port of call is the OntologyEditor, which needs some way for the
user
to specify the database, tables and columns to import. My idea is to create
an
extra tab panel, which will look something like this:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/Enterprise%20Zeus/s
ketches/ontEd.gif?rev=1.1&content-type=image/gif&cvsroot=ZeusAgent

The general idea being that the user forms a connection to the database, and
the table/columns to import and the OntologyEd creates equivalent facts of
the
most appropriate matching type.

One issue raised is that of naming. Say I import surname from a table called
customer, should I just store that in the ontology as customer.surname?
That would make it easier to map facts back to the tables they're grounded
in.

There may be other issues related to database schemas being relational
whilst
our ontology is class-based. If you can think of anything, tell me.

Cheers,

Jaron