Help with database planning

[Juliano]

Hello, everybody.

I'm a linguist with practical skills on computers/programming.

We've been working with an ontology at my department, and now I need
to create a GUI viewer for the flat file we have.
I tried to write an Ontology class which manages the data read and
parsed from the flat file, but it takes a relatively long time.
Besides, we have plans to set up a website for online display of said
ontology. So, I have been being pushed towards changing the basic plan
and build a DB so that data access will be faster and easier for both
the desktop GUI and the web app. Right now, I'm trying to work with
sqlite, since it can be used as a separate file for the GUI and as a
DB for Django (which may be the choice for the web interface).

I have been redaing some books on DBs but I kind of get stuck when it
comes to the normalization and the planning of the tables. The problem
is that we have basically four fields that can be arranged in a tree-
like structure. Eg:

Concept
  |----- Slot
  |        `------ Facet
  |                  `------ Filler
  `----- Slot
           `------ Facet
                     `------ Filler
                     `------ Filler
    ...

So, for ONE *concept*, we have, usually, MANY *slots*, each *slot* has
ONE *facet*, and each *facet* can have MORE THAN ONE *filler*.
Besides, some *slots* and *fillers* are themselves *concepts*,
creating a sort of recursive reference.

<begin table>
line_no	concepts	slots	facets	fillers
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00000	ABANDON	DEFINITION	VALUE	"to leave or desert something or
someone"
00001	ABANDON	IS-A	VALUE	EXIT
00002	ABANDON	LEXE	MAP-LEX	"leave behind-V1"
00003	ABANDON	LEXE	MAP-LEX	abandon-V1
(...)
97420	ZULU	DEFINITION	VALUE	"a language or dialect spoken in south
africa and others"
97421	ZULU	INSTANCE-OF	VALUE	OTHER-NIGER-KORDOFANIAN-LANGUAGE
97422	ZULU	LANGUAGE-OF	INV	LESOTHO
97423	ZULU	LANGUAGE-OF	INV	SOUTH-AFRICA
<end table>

I tried to create index tables for concepts, slots, facets and
fillers, which gave me the following table:

<begin table>
line_no	concepts	slots	facets	fillers
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
00000	cn_00000	sl_00048	fc_00007	fl_07349
00001	cn_00000	cn_02605	fc_00007	cn_01768
00002	cn_00000	sl_00121	fc_00002	fl_04329
00003	cn_00000	sl_00121	fc_00002	fl_15009
(...)
97420	cn_05429	sl_00048	fc_00007	fl_01340
97421	cn_05429	cn_02493	fc_00007	cn_03526
97422	cn_05429	cn_02750	fc_00001	cn_02816
97423	cn_05429	cn_02750	fc_00001	cn_04580
<end table>

(cn_XXXXX from concept index, sl_XXXXX from slot index,
fc_XXXXX from facet index, fl_XXXXX from filler index.)

As you can see, only concepts and facets are populated by their own
type of data.
Whereas slots and fillers can be populated by their own types or by
concepts.

What would be a good way to create tables for this situation?
In fact, this is the first time I've ever tried to create a DB, so I'm
completely lost.

I'm looking forward to a reply...

Thank you very much,
Juliano