Exploring logical and hierarchical information to map relational databases into ontologies. (18th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Tissot, Hegler; Huve, Cristiane Aparecida Gonçalves; Peres, Leticia Mara; Fabro, Marcos Didonet Del
• Is Part Of: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies. Volume 13:Number 3(2019)
• Page Start: 191
• Page End: 208
• Publication Date: 2019-05-18
• Subjects: ontologies -- rule-based integration -- logical model -- hierarchical structures; Metadata -- Periodicals; Semantic Web -- Periodicals; Ontologies (Information retrieval) -- Periodicals; Data structures (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 005.74
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2621

Abstract

Ontologies are formal specifications of conceptualisations. Their designs require to understand the concepts involved in the domain to be mapped. One well-known method to produce ontologies is to extract their concepts from relational databases. We conducted a practical study over a real-world scenario on applying existing rules and we identified open issues to be addressed, such as the utilisation of logical metadata as a proper vocabulary, the implementation targeted to specific domains and mappings of hierarchical and self-hierarchical structures. In this paper, we present a novel approach that overcomes these issues. Our solution uses physical and logical models to enrich the terminology produced in the target ontology. It also contains a more comprehensive set of rules, taking into account instances and (self) hierarchies. We validate our approach with two experiments from the healthcare domain as input.