Ontology Management in a Service-Oriented Architecture: Architecture of a Knowledge Base Access Service

An increasing number of information systems integrate semantic data stores for managing ontologies. To access these knowledge bases most of the available implementations provide application programming interfaces (APIs). The implementations of these APIs normally do not support any kind of network protocol or service interface. This works fine as long as a monolithic system is developed. If the need arises to integrate such a knowledge base into a service-oriented architecture a different approach is needed. In this paper we propose an architecture to address this issue. A first demonstrator was fully implemented in the European project PESCaDO. Several services access and work on a central knowledge base access service which supports multi-threaded access for parallel instantiated ontologies.