BUILDING ONTOLOGIES OVER RELATIONAL DATABASES

Abstract

Relational Databases are typically created to fulfil the information requirements of a community of users generally belongs to a single organization. Data stored in these databases were typically accessed by using Structured Query Languages or through customized interfaces.  With the popularity of the World Wide Web and the availability of large number of Relational Databases for public access there is a need for users to retrieve data from these databases by using a text-based queries, possibly by using the terms that they are familiar with. However, the inherent limitations of Structured Query Languages used to create and access data in relational Data Bases does not allow uses to access data by using text-based queries. Also, the terms used in queries should be limited to those used during the construction of the databases. This paper proposes an architecture to generated ontologies over relation databases and show how they could be enhanced semantically by using available domain-specific or top-level ontologies so that the data managed by the DBs can be accessed by using text-based queries. The feasibility of the proposed architecture was demonstrated by building a prototype system over a sample MySQL database.