¹College of Computer and Information, Hohai University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210098, China
²School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA

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Abstract—The main purpose of the Semantic Web is driving the evolution of the current Web by enabling users to find, share, and combine information more easily. OWL ontologies play a key role in this effort. It is widely believed that the majority of current Web data sources are powered by relational databases (RDB). Thus developing approaches and tools for extracting OWL ontologies from RDB is helpful in bridging the gap between the existing Web data sources and the Semantic Web. This paper proposes a formal approach to automatic extraction of OWL ontologies from RDB using database reverse engineering (DBRE) technologies. The DBRE-based approach first identifies different relational structures to capture the natural domain semantics hidden in the relational schemas and data. Then it performs an automatic RDB-to-OWL schema translation by following a set of predefined translation rules that are based on the conceptual correspondences between RDB schema and OWL DL ontology. Our prototype implementation and case studies show that the proposed approach is feasible and effective.

Index Terms—Ontology development, schema translation, relational database, database reverse engineering, OWL ontology.

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Cite: Lili Lin, Zhuoming Xu, Ying Ding, "OWL Ontology Extraction from Relational Databases via Database Reverse Engineering," Journal of Software vol. 8, no. 11, pp. 2749-2760, 2013.