Metatopia Conference 2007

From Data Models to Ontologies: A Tutorial

David Hay David Hay
President
Essential Strategies, Inc.


Tuesday 2:15pm - 3:15pm

Level: Data Management - Intermediate

The world of data modeling and database design has developed over nearly 40 years within the information technology industry. The world of semantics and ontologies has developed over about 2500 years within the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and more recently, artificial intelligence. The time has finally come to bring these worlds together. This presentation is an attempt to take the first steps towards doing that.

The presentation will describe data modeling in its various forms and use an example to show the relationships between its concepts and those of the ontology language OWL. Covered will be the relationships between entity classes and OWL classes, attributes and datatype properties, and relationships and object properties. This will include a discussion of taxonomies and alternative classification approaches.

The presentation will focus on both the similarities and the fundamental differences between the two approaches.

Speaker Bio
In the Information Industry since the days of punched cards, paper tape, and teletype machines, Dave Hay has been producing data models to support strategic and requirements planning for more than twenty years. He has worked in a variety of industries, including, among others, banking, clinical pharmaceutical research, and all aspects of oil production and processing. He is the founder and President of Essential Strategies, Inc., a fourteen-year-old consulting firm dedicated to helping clients define corporate information architecture, identify requirements, and plan strategies for the implementation of new systems. Dave is the author of the book, Data Model Patterns: Conventions of Thought and Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture. In addition, his new book, Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map, is a comprehensive schema of metadata from many different perspectives. He has spoken at numerous international and local DAMA conferences, Oracle user group conferences, and many others.
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