借助数据库逆向工程从关系数据库抽取OWL本体.docVIP

  OWL Ontology Extraction from Relational Databases via Database Reverse Engineering# LIN Lili1, XU Zhuoming1, DING Ying2** 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 (1. College of Computer and Information, Hohai University, NanJing 210098; 2. School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA) Abstract: The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share, and combine information more easily. OWL ontologies play a key role in this effort. It is widely believed that the majority of current Web data sources are powered by relational databases (RDB). Thus investigating approaches and tools for extracting OWL ontologies from RDB is helpful in bridging the gap between the existing Web data sources and the Semantic Web. This paper proposes a formal approach to automatic extraction of OWL ontologies from RDB using database reverse engineering (DBRE) technologies. The DBRE-based approach first identifies different relational structures to capture the natural domain semantics hidden in the relational schemas and data. Then it performs an automatic RDB-to-OWL schema translation by following a set of predefined translation rules that are based on the conceptual correspondences between RDB schema and OWL DL ontology. Our prototype implementation and case studies show that the proposed approach is feasible and effective. Keywords: ontology development; schema translation; relational database; database reverse engineering; OWL ontology 0 Introduction The success of the Semantic Web [1] depends heavily on quick and cheap construction of Web ontologies. The importance of ontologies to the Semantic Web has prompted the establishment of the OWL ontology language [2, 3] and the development of various OWL-aware ontology tools. Unfortunately, manual ontology development using current OWL ontology editors, such as Protégé, remains a tedious and time-consuming task that can easily result in a knowledge