Relational database semantic access based on ontology

Abstract

Ontology plays more and more roles in creating semantic data in the Semantic Web. Now, because large amounts of data in legacy system are stored and managed in relational database, so there are many existing approaches used to transform relational databases into to ontologies, including ontologies definition and instances. But when vast amount of instance data are stored in OWL files, it is very difficult to manage and query. So, an ontology-based approach for accessing relational database is proposed in this paper, which acquires OWL ontology based on relational database schema, and the instances data still store in database. The ontology is viewed as mediated schema providing shared vocabularies for Semantic Web to be queried using SPARQL. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.