A light weight approach for ontology generation and change synchronization between ontologies and source relational databases

Ontology is specification of shared conceptualization and is building block of the semantic Web. Ontology building requires a detailed domain analysis that in turn requires financial resources, intensive domain knowledge and time. Most of industrial data is present in relational databases and a relational database schema represents a domain model. An ontology built from this schema can represent concepts and relationships that are present in domain of discourse. However, databases are not static and their schema evolves over time. Once a database schema is changed, these changes in schema should also be incorporated in ontology, generated from this database. The possible solution of regenerating a new ontology from changed database schema is not feasible because this will result in loss of manual changes of ontology. In this paper we present an approach that can be used to generate ontology from RDBs and to synchronize the generated ontology with changes occurred in the same database. We also present the prototypical implementation of the proposed approach as Protégé plug-in (i.e. DATAONTO) that can be used to generate ontology from database and to synchronize the ontology with the original database.