Author:
Edward S. Blurock
Affiliation:
Blurock Consulting AB, Lund, Sweden
Keyword(s):
Ontology Use Case, Database System, Chemical Kinetics, Experimental Data, Chemical Modelling.
Abstract:
This paper describes the use of ontologies interacting with a noSQL database (Google Cloud Firestore) in multiple capacities in the database system CHEMCONNECT. The motivation is to implement the ‘Data on the Web Best Practices” as recommended by the W3C (https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-dwbp-20170131/, 2017) in an application within the physical chemistry and instrumentation. First, the ontology provides semantic enhancement to each database object through meta-data, standard vocabularies and data object relationships. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the database objects and the ontology objects. Another use of the ontology is to provide a data-driven model for the creation, provenance and versioning of database objects. One aspect of this is the use of domain specific templates to guide the construction of the database objects. The definition of each database object is in a hierarchy of catalog objects, record objects and components (using the DCAT ontology model). Withi
n each of these object definitions is a link describing how a create a set of automatically generated RDF objects within the CHEMCONNECT database. The RDFs facilitate searching the database. To facilitate versioning, data source tracking and data quality control, operations on the database are organized as transactions. In CHEMCONNECT a transaction has a one to one correspondence with the underlying JAVA operation in the implementation. Within the transaction definition, the set of prerequisites and the output of the operation is defined. The use of transactions helps organize and give semantic enhancement to the set of individual operations within the implementation. The work in this paper is on-going and as the first use-case is concentrating experimental and theoretical information in the chemical domain. The implementation is written in JAVA and is using Google Cloud firestore as the database.
(More)