Generating Ontology Classes and Hierarchical Relationships from Relational Database View Definitions
Jun-Seok Yang, Ki-Sung Kim, Hyoung-Joo Kim · 2010
Building ontology is the key factor to construct semantic web. However, this is time-consuming process. Hence, there are several approaches which automatically generate the ontologies from relational databases. Current studies on the automatic generation of the ontologies from relational database are focused on generating the ontology by analyzing the database schema and stored data. These studies generate the ontology by analyzing only tables and constraints in the schema and ignore view definitions. However, view definitions are defined by a database designer considering the domain of the database. Hence, by considering view definitions, additional classes and hierarchical relationships can be generated. And these are useful in answering queries and integration of ontologies. In this paper, we formalize the generation of classes and hierarchical relationships by analyzing existing methods, and we propose the method which generates additional classes and hierarchical relationships by analyzing view definitions. Finally, we analyze the generated ontology by applying our method to synthetic data and real-world data. We show that our method generates meaningful classes and hierarchical relationships using view definitions.