A framework for OWL DL based Ontology Construction from Relational Database using Mapping and Semantic Rules

Abstract

World Wide Web (WWW) is capable of retrieving the results only through location finding of search terms, where as Semantic web retrieves by analysing the keywords because of the machine accessible nature of semantic data. One such Semantic data format is Ontology. Ontologies are the web documents generated by Web Ontology Language to provide more precise web content, thus by improving the performance of information retrieval. Semantic web requires data either in terms of manual creation or through conversion from existing data. Ontologies lack semantically rich data because the manual construction of these documents are time consuming and also the domain experts need to understand the syntax and semantics of Ontology development languages. One alternate to compensate for the rich set of data is to take the contents of Relational Data Base (RDB) for domain related applications in the Semantic Web. This is possible by mapping the RDB constructs into Ontology constructs. This paper proposes an RDB to Ontology mapping system framework which can generate an Ontology based on the proposed Mapping Rules for a Banking domain. The Mapping rules are generated both for, 1) direct mapping 2) integrity constraints mapping. Direct mapping is, RDB components like table, attribute, data are mapped to the corresponding Ontology components. Integrity constraints mapping covers primary key, foreign key and column constraints mapped to the relevant Ontology components. This is the direct translation of RDB structure. This paper also proposes additional Semantic Rules for the generated Ontology to provide richer semantics. This in turn provides more expressiveness in Ontology representation and also efficient reasoning power.

Exploring logical and hierarchical information to map relational databases into ontologies

“…Louhdi et al [6] propose a set of transformation rules which analyzes stored data to detect disjointness and totalness constraints in hierarchies and it calculates the participation level of tables in n-ary relations. Ramathilagam & Valarmathi [4] propose an RDB to Ontol-ogy mapping framework that can generate an Ontology based on the proposed mapping rules for a banking domain. This framework also includes additional semantic rules to improve the expressiveness for the generated ontology regarding to the search and retrieval processes.…”

“…To show how our approach differs from some of the previous works [15,6,4], we compare the resulting ontologies performing a manual mapping using a subset of mapping rules that affects the ontology hierarchical structure (classes and properties). We select these works because they clearly presents the definition and application of their mapping rules, unambiguously.…”

“…However, building ontologies from scratch or manually is a complex, mistakable and time consuming process [3]. Moreover, the domain experts need to understand the syntax and semantics of ontology development languages, often leading to poor definitions [4].…”

A software system for agent-assisted ontology building

“…Most of them propose frameworks with a set of rules and mapping related to the target knowledge domain to create an ontology from the RDB (Trinh et al , 2006;Choi and Kim, 2012 ;Ramathilagam and Valarmathi, 2013). The approach requires an ontology developer who is adept at the language syntax, semantics, and the development methodology.…”