Database-to-ontology mapping generation for semantic interoperability

In order to achieve efficient interoperability of information systems, ontologies play an important role in resolving semantic heterogeneity. We propose a general interoperability architecture that uses ontologies for explicit description of the semantics of information sources, and web services to facilitate the communication between the different components of the architecture. It consists of 1) data provider services for mapping information sources to local source ontologies, 2) a knowledge base for representing reference domain ontology, and 3) several web services for encapsulating the different functionalities of the architecture. In this paper, we focus on a component of the architecture which is a tool, called DB2OWL, that automatically generates ontologies from database schemas as well as mappings that relate the ontologies to the information sources. The mapping process starts by detecting particular cases for conceptual elements in the database and accordingly converts database components to the corresponding ontology components. A prototype of DB2OWL tool is implemented to create OWL ontology from relational database