Building ontologies from relational databases

Abstract

There are many relational databases (RDBs) on the web that store important and useful information. But, semantic search engines cannot use this kind of information for their search results. To overcome this problem, an approach is proposed to transform relational database schema and data into the corresponding ontology. In this paper, an approach to transform a relational database into its equivalent ontology is presented. The proposed method is implemented using Jena and MySQL and is applied on a sample RDB. The resulting ontology is shown as an OWL file. By validating the new ontology through reasoning, its correctness was verfied. ©2009 IEEE.