© Rinton Press ONTOLOGY AND DATABASE MAPPING: A SURVEY OF CURRENT IMPLEMENTATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In this paper we discuss the problem of mapping relational database contents and ontologies. The motivation lies in the fact that during the latest years, the evolution in Web Technologies rendered the addition of intelligence to the information residing on the Web a necessity. We argue that the addition of formal semantics to the databases that store the majority of information found in the Web is important, in order to make this information searchable, accessible and retrievable. The key technologies towards this direction are the Semantic Web and the ontologies. We analyze in this paper the approaches that have so far been presented in order to exploit the prospects that such collaboration promises. We set the theoretical and practical boundaries of the mapping problem, we delve into the tools that altogether comprise today’s state of the art, and we provide a discussion about the benefits and the drawbacks of the existing approaches. We discuss the feasibility and viability of applying the mappings in real world applications as well as the directions that the evolution of current implementations should follow. We conclude by presenting the requirements that should be met in order to provide a more powerful next generation of mapping frameworks