Ontology learning from relational databases: Transforming recursive relationships to OWL2 components

Abstract

Relational databases (RDB) are widely used as a backend for information systems, and contain interesting structured data (schema and data). In the case of ontology learning, RDB can be used as knowledge source. Multiple approaches exist for building ontologies from RDB. They mainly use schema mapping to transform RDB components to ontologies. Most existing approaches do not deal with recursive relationships that can encapsulate good semantics. In this paper, two technics are proposed for transforming recursive relationships to OWL2 components: (1) Transitivity mechanism and (2) Concept Hierarchy. The main objective of this work is to build richer ontologies with deep taxonomies from RDB.