Title: Exploring logical and hierarchical information to map relational databases into ontologies

Authors: Hegler Tissot; Cristiane Aparecida Gonçalves Huve; Leticia Mara Peres; Marcos Didonet Del Fabro

Addresses: Federal University of Parana, CS Department, C3SL Labs, Curitiba, Brazil ' Federal University of Parana, CS Department, C3SL Labs, Curitiba, Brazil ' Federal University of Parana, CS Department, C3SL Labs, Curitiba, Brazil ' Federal University of Parana, CS Department, C3SL Labs, Curitiba, Brazil

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.

Keywords: ontologies; rule-based integration; logical model; hierarchical structures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2019.099834

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2019 Vol.13 No.3, pp.191 - 208

Received: 24 Aug 2018
Accepted: 03 Feb 2019
Published online: 23 May 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article