An XPath-based OWL storage model for effective ontology management in Semantic Web environment

With the rapid growth of the Web, the volume of information on the Web is increasing exponentially. However, information on the current Web is only understandable to humans, and this makes precise information retrieval difficult. To solve this problem, the Semantic Web was proposed. We must use ontology languages that can assign data the semantics for realizing the Semantic Web. One of the representative ontology languages is the Web ontology language OWL, adopted as a recommendation by the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C). OWL includes hierarchical structural information between classes or properties. Therefore, an efficient OWL storage model that considers a hierarchical structure for effective information retrieval on the Semantic Web is required. In this paper we suggest an XPath-based OWL storage (XPOS) model, which includes hierarchical information between classes or properties in XPath form, and enables intuitive and effective information retrieval. Also, we show the comparative evaluation results for the performance of the XPOS model, Sesame, and the XML file system-based storage (XFSS) model, in terms of query processing and ontology updating.