Automatic Transformation of Relational Database Schema into OWL Ontologies

Ontology alignment, or ontology matching, is a technique to map different concepts between ontologies. For this purpose at least two ontologies are required. In certain scenarios, such as data integration, heterogeneous database integration and data model compatibility evaluation, a need to transform a relational database schema to an ontology can arise. To conduct a successful transformation it is necessary to identify the differences between relational database schema and ontology information representation methods, and then to define transformation rules. The most straight forward but time consuming way to carry out transformation is to do it manually. Often this is not an option due to the size of data to be transformed. For this reason there is a need for an automated solution. The automatic transformation of OWL ontology from relational database schema is presented in this paper; the data representation differences between relational database schema and OWL ontologies are described; the transformation rules are defined and the transformation tool’s prototype is developed to perform the described transformation.