Proposal for a Mutual Conversion Relational Database-Ontology Approach

Abstract

Abstract-Whereas ontologies are formal knowledge representations, conveying a shared understanding of a given domain, databases are a mature technology that describes specifications for the storage, retrieval, organization, and processing of data in information systems to ensure data integrity. Ontologies offer the functionality of conceptual modeling while complying with the web constraints regarding publication, querying and annotation, as well as the capacity of formality and reasoning to enable data consistency and checking. Ontologies converted to databases could exploit the maturity of database technologies, and databases converted to ontologies could utilize ontology technologies to be more used in the context of the semantic web. This work aims to propose a generic approach that enables converting a relational database into an ontology and vice versa. A tool based on this approach has been implemented as a proof of a concept.

Ontology Driven for Mapping a Relational Database to a Knowledge-based System

“…This method is converting only ternary and binary relationships. Other works by the work in [3] proposed an approach for converting a relational database into an ontology, while the works in [19,20] proposed methods for automatically mapping a relational database to an ontology. More recently, the work in [21] proposed a method for converting ERDs into a knowledge-based system.…”

“…However, there is a significant lack of effective and efficient mapping methods for converting a relational database into a knowledge-based system. Moreover, according to [3], there is a critical need to provide for the cohabitation of relational databases and ontological technologies. An ontology is developed based on logic, therefore, finding a way to represent a relational database by using logic would bridge the gap between ontological and relational databases.…”