Maintaining Materialized Relations Incrementally to Improve Performance of Ontology Query

For ontology-based applications, the efficiency of ontology query is vital. Different from existing approaches, the paper improves performance of ontology query by materializing some derived relations. Experimental results show that the integrated performance of ontology query can be improved greatly by maintaining materialized relations and the materialized relations technique has good scalability. Here the challenge is how to maintain the materialized relations incrementally with the update of ontologies. Because transitive relations are in common use in ontology, the paper proposes a novel algorithm for maintaining transitive materialized relations incrementally based on a special weighted materialized relation transitive graph, which can solve the coexistence problem of multiple derived paths better and proves the correctness of the algorithm.