A Meta-Framework for Generating Ontologies from Legacy Schemas

A huge amount of schemas are expressed within outdated schema languages which are restricted concerning expressiveness, extensibility, readability, and understandability. Consequently, the actual intention of the schema developers is hard to grasp. Reverse engineering approaches try to tackle this problem by automatically transforming legacy schemas into ontologies, but rarely enhance the semantics of the schemas by exploiting the higher expressiveness of modern schema languages. Therefore, we propose a meta-framework for generating ontologies from legacy schemas going beyond existing approaches. This meta-framework is instantiable for various schema reverse engineering scenarios and allows to generate ontologies with improved structures and semantics compared to the original legacy schemas by exploiting the advanced expressiveness of modern schema languages. Finally, this meta-framework allows for the automatic migration of data from the legacy schemas into instances of the generated ontologies.