Sophia: Providing Basic Knowledge Services with a Common DBMS

Knowledge base systems have not captured the wide audience enjoyed by database management systems (DBMS). The capabilities of the most high-end knowledge representation and delivery systems are extensive, but may not be pragmatic or accessible to a large community of potential users. We present SOPHIA, a frame-based knowledge architecture which is built upon a relational DBMS (RDBMS) to provide basic frame access capabilities. SOPHIA stores frames in a table with frame/slot/value fields, and does not map individual knowledge classes to separate tables. It complements existing ontology tools because it allows the output of these systems to be compiled and delivered from a more modest DBMS. The KB query/update functions of Sophia are written in SQL and are based loosely upon the OKBC core specification. These functions can be accessed by clients through a URL mechanism or ODBC calls. SOPHIA is being used to deliver a knowledge base back-end for two molecular biology software applications.