Schema Stability as Ontology Advantage

Relational database schemas tend to remain stable over time. Text corpora grow continuously.

This asymmetry has practical implications for ontology learning: database-derived ontologies can be learned once and reused, while text-derived ontologies require continuous updates and complex merging as new documents introduce potentially redundant or conflicting entities.

The schema already encodes domain expertise, someone already decided what entities matter and how they relate. That work doesn’t need to be redone.

Related: 06-atom—ontology-merging-complexity, 06-atom—ontology-guided-kg-construction