View-Concepts: Knowledge-Based Access to Databases

Semantic data models for database systems provide powerful tools to assist database administrators in designing and maintaining schemas, but provide little or no direct support for users of the database. Some research has been done on mapping user models of a domain to the underlying database using semantic schemas. Little has been done, however, on mapping conceptually meaningful data structures to a database lacking a semantic schema, or to a multi-database system that lacks a consistent semantic schema. We argue for the appropriateness of a knowledge representation language as a language for describing the database schema, user data structures, and the mapping between them; present a problem domain in which an existing relational database without a semantic schema must be accessed by a knowledge-based application; and describe our implementation of a system that provides access to a relational database from a KL-ONEstyle knowledge representation language.