Information for "RDB2ONT: A Tool for Generating OWL Ontologies From Relational Database Systems"

In this paper, an algorithm and tool for generating OWL ontologies from relational database systems is presented. The tool, RDB2ONT, helps the domain experts to quickly generate and publish OWL ontologies describing the underlying relational database systems while preserving their structural constraints. The generated ontologies are constructed using a set of vocabularies and structures defined in schema that describes relational database systems on the web so they guarantees that user applications can work with data instances that conformed to a set of known vocabularies and structures. The generated ontologies provide a standardized and meaningful way for describing the underlying relational database systems so they “bridge” the semantic gaps between the ontologies describing relational database systems and/or the ontologies describing other data sources on the web such as flat-files, semi-structures, etc. Concepts in OWL ontologies can be defined at multiple levels of granularities thus the generated OWL ontologies can be used to address the semantic heterogeneity problem at multiple levels. Evolutions of database systems in large-scale environments are inevitable so by using the RDB2ONT tool, OWL ontologies can be re-generated with little effort from the domain experts thus speed up the process of facilitating data in the underlying relational database systems with other data sources on the web.

Although the generated OWL ontologies provide the explicit meaning of concepts and their semantic relationships between related concepts, there are still many open research questions that need to be addressed. One of the questions is how to merge the generated OWL ontologies into an integrated OWL ontology so that common views of concepts

can be achieved? This would allow users to pose queries on the common views of concepts rather than the concepts defined in the individual ontologies.