An HTML-Form-Driven Approach to Reverse Engineering of Relational Databases to Ontologies

Abstract

The migration of the Deep Web to the Semantic Web calls for reverse engineering of relational databases to ontologies. However, there exist few approaches that consider an ontology as the target for reverse engineering. The existing approaches are faced with two main problems. First, they can require more information about a relational database than it is possible to provide in practice. Second, they can make unrealistic assumptions about the relational database; e.g. the relational database is in 3NF. As an attempt to resolve these problems, we propose a novel approach. Rather than analyzing a relational schema, tuples, or user queries to build an ontology, our approach takes advantage of HTML forms - popular user-friendly interface to access relational databases on the Web today. By analyzing the forms, our approach can deliver benefits that could not otherwise be achieved with the existing approaches. These benefits are twofold. First, only minimal information about the relational database is required. Second, the relational database can be bad-designed, optimized and denormalized.