Extracting ontologies from relational databases

With the development of Web technology, data-intensive Web sites, which are usually based on relational databases, are seeking ways to migrate to the ontology-based Semantic Web. However, much of the work on reverse engineering has been done on extracting entity-relationship and object models from relational databases. There exist only a few approaches that consider ontologies, as the target for reverse engineering. We propose a novel approach. Compared with the existing approaches, our approach has advantages in that: (1) it allows the user to extract more semantics from a relational database, and (2) it reduces user interaction for semantic annotation.