A formal semantics-preserving translation from fuzzy relational database schema to fuzzy OWL DL ontology

Abstract

How to construct Web ontologies has become a key technology to enable the Semantic Web, especially how to construct ontologies by extracting domain knowledge from database models such as the relational database model. But in real-world applications, information is often imprecise and uncertain, thus the formal approach to translation from Fuzzy Relational Database Schema (FRDBS) to fuzzy ontology is helpful for extracting domain knowledge from database, which can profitably support fuzzy ontology development and developing data-intensive Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we first give the formal definition of FRDBS. Then, the formal definition and Model-Theoretic semantics of a kind of new fuzzy OWL DL ontology are given in more detail. What's more, we realize the formal translation from FRDBS to fuzzy OWL DL ontology by means of reverse engineering technique. Of course, the correctness of translation is also proved. With an example, it shows that the translation method is semantics-preserving and effective. Finally, the reasoning problem of satisfiability, subsumption, and redundancy of FRDBS may reason automatically through reasoning mechanism of the corresponding fuzzy description logic f-SHOIN(D) of fuzzy OWL DL ontology is also investigated, which can further contribute to constructing fuzzy OWL DL ontologies exactly that meet application's needs well. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.