Accessing OWL ontologies from IT systems can bring many problems unfamiliar to developers used to the more common relational storage approach. These problems stem from the dynamic nature of ontologies, their open-world character and expressiveness. In this paper, we present the Java OWL Persistence API (JOPA), a persistence layer allowing object-oriented access to semantic web ontologies. It supports features like caching, transactional processing and a semantically clear contract between the ontology and the object model. In addition, we present the OntoDriver, a software layer decoupling storage access from the object-ontological mapping. We provide an in-depth theoretical complexity analysis of our approach in connection with an analysis and practical evaluation of the performance of ontological storage with regards to application access scenario.
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