Fully automatic OWL generator from RDB schema

Abstract

Use of ontologies in information systems and artificial intelligence has been emphasized in the recent years. Other than standardizing the vocabulary across a domain, ontologies enable the sharing of information between disparate systems within the same domain. Ontology engineers spend a lot of efforts in developing ontologies. A large amount of data on the Web is stored in the relational databases. In this paper, we have proposed and developed a tool that can fully automatically develop OWL ontology from a relational database. The main focus of our research is to develop a transformation process and to create rules for mappings between RDB and OWL constructs. Existing approaches have drawbacks that they are not fully automatic, performed mapping at a very basic level, outdated and are not easily accessible. In case of a large database, the existing tools fail to perform conversions efficiently. Our proposed tool is evaluated on different relational databases and can successfully perform the transformation with new mapping rules. Our tool is able to develop sub-data-properties and sub-classes which was never available before.