Research and implementation of domain-specific ontology building from relational database

With the development of the Semantic Web, ontology is playing an increasingly important role in many research areas such as semantic interoperability and knowledge base. However, building ontology manually is time-consuming and error-prone. In such a case, this paper proposes a method of building domain-specific OWL ontology from relational database automatically. This method establishes three mapping rules from relational database schema to ontology class and property. Based on these rules, an initial ontology of material science that can be modified later is built and ontology instances can be generated. At the end of this paper, a prototype of this method is implemented and the experimental result shows this method is effective and useful in ontology learning and knowledge base building.