1. A method for supporting semantic matching queries in a Structured Query Language/eXtensible Markup Language (SQL/XML) database management system (DBMS) with native XML support, having a given relational database, comprising: storing transitive relationships of a given ontology as an ontology relational database in the DBMS; and searching the combined given relational database and the ontology relational database using SQL/XML search operators supported by the DBMS.