OWL/Relational Mapping Rules to Use Relational Databases as OWL 2 Web Ontologies

This paper proposes a set of rules to automatically generate OWL ontologies from relational databases. The purpose of the rules is to allow semantic access to existing RDB data without any database schema transformation and data migration process. In other words, the rules help a RDBMS play as a web ontology repository as well. However, the use of the mapping rules between RDB and OWL proposed by other studies for the objective causes troubles as follows. First, databases including the tables with a specific structure can`t be translated into OWL. Second, the process for extracting an OWL individual unnecessarily lead to database join operations, or several SQL queries. On the other hand, our rules is designed to prevent these problems, can generate OWL classes and properties from database schemas and can generate OWL individuals from the database instances. In addition, an ontology generated by our rules is an OWL 2 DL ontology.