MDS++: Supporting ontology-based dynamic classification in WebSphere Metadata Server

Abstract

Metadata management systems are growing from tool-specific repositories to enterprise-wide metadata repositories. In this context, one challenge is the management of the evolving metadata whose schema or meta-model itself may evolve, e.g., dynamically-added properties, which are often hard to predict upfront at the initial meta-model design time; another challenge is to organize the metadata by semantically-rich classification schemes. In this paper, we demonstrate a practical system which provides support for users to dynamically manage semanticallyrich properties and classifications in the IBM WebSphere Metadata Server (MDS) by integrating an OWL ontology repository. To enable the smooth acceptance of Semantic Web technologies, the system is designed to consist of integrated modeling paradigms, with an integrated query language and runtime repository.