RDB2ONT: A Tool for Generating OWL Ontologies From Relational Database Systems

This paper describes a framework that uses the Semantic Web infrastructure to address semantic interoperability between relational database systems in large-scale environments and at multiple levels of granularities. Given a relational database system, we describe a formal algorithm to use the relational database Rs meta-data and structural constraints to construct its OWL ontology while preserving the structural constraints of the underlying relational database system. The generated ontology is described using and conforming to a set of vocabularies defined in an ontology that describes relational database systems on the web. Using this set of vocabularies guarantee that applications on the web can work with data instances that conformed to a set of known vocabularies and structures. Finally, we describe our prototype and how semantic conflicts are resolved between multiple relational database systems using the generated ontologies.