Automatic Mapping of Relational Databases to OWL Antology

Nowadays relational models are most frequently used to store, treat and extract data. Yet, the increase of semantic web technologies and the fast development of its applications based on ontology have made the problem of migrating RDB to OWL an active research domain. The difficulties with this problem lay especially in the treatment of semantic constraints of the data stored in RDB which let the transition from RDB to OWL require a thorough study of all characteristics of the data structures to be converted. In this context, we give a state of the art comparison of existing mapping methods from RDB to RDF/OWL and propose a novel migration solution that generalizes these methods, optimizes constraints extraction and retains the RDB source schema characteristics. A tool based on our approach has also been developed and tested to demonstrate the effectiveness and power of our strategy. Keywords— web ontology; semantic web; relational database RDB; OWL