BootOX is (not) yet another ontology and mapping bootstrapper. Our main motivation to implement a new bootstrapper is to give more flexibility on the bootstrapping steps. Most of the existing approaches commit to concrete purposes or to a concrete ontology expressiveness. BootOX allows to define different "profiles" depending on the application scenario and the required Semantic Web technologies. For example, if the bootstrapped ontology is to be used in a so-called Ontology Based Data Access (OBDA) scenario where the ontology provides a virtual access layer to the data, OWL 2 QL will be chosen as the ontology language as it is required by the query rewriting engine. Nevertheless, if the data is materialised, one could opt for other OWL 2 profiles depending on the used query answering engine.
BootOX also allows to import domain ontologies, which will be integrated to the bootstrapped one via ontology alignment or directly mapped to the database.
BootOX follows the W3C direct mapping directives to connect the ontological vocabulary to the relational database; moreover, it offers a suit of advanced techniques for the bootstrapping of mappings that are beyond the direct ones. Furthermore, it extends the bootstrapped mappings with provenance information.
We plan to implement a standalone version of BootOX in the close future. Currently, BootOX is integrated within the Optique's project platform and it can be tested via its public demonstrator (user: demo, password: demo). See Northwind tutorial for more details.
Some demo videos can also be found in the Optique's youtube channel.
Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, Evgeny Kharlamov, Dmitriy Zheleznyakov, Ian Horrocks