Defining Ontologies Within the FDB Model

The FDB (Framework Database) is a set theoretic model that supports the administration of any multilingual database and thesaurus both at data and interface level through a universal schema. FDB exploits the information derived from the underlying multilingual thesauri and the FDB algorithms which automatically correlate data with appropriate thesaurus terms to provide conceptual search into the FDB databases. The current paper presents the definition of any multilingual ontology into the FDB model under the same FDB universal schema. The paper suggests the definition of the necessary metadata for defining any multilingual ontology, it briefly presents ontology examples, it proposes the use of existing thesauri linking algorithms to correlate database frame objects (database records) with the appropriate ontology terms. The paper takes advantage of the underlying FDB schema, which allows the definition of any multilingual thesaurus, for setting ontologies and proposes the framework for defining and incorporating ontologies, thesauri, and databases in the same FDB universal schema for enforcing conceptual database retrieval.