A Systematic Approach to Review Legacy Schemas Based on Ontological Analysis

Usually, data schemas are the only documentation available for legacy data. Information Technology (IT) artifacts, such as conceptual schemas, if existent, are often outdated. This leads to inconsistencies and ambiguities, as well as difficulties in reusing data. This work proposes an approach for reviewing data schemas based on ontological analysis, which considers each concept according to its nature, capturing more precisely its essence and generally improving semantic richness and precision. The idea is to provide a systematic procedure to annotate legacy data, starting with its conceptual schema, and thus to contribute to generate more consistent conceptual modeling artifacts. In order to illustrate the proposed procedure, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) is used as a theoretical reference for annotating a real data schema in the Legal domain.