A Semi-Automatic Ontology Construction Method Based On Relational Database

As an efficient hierarchical structure and semantics concept model, Ontology have aroused the concern of many researchers at home and abroad since introduced into the computer science, and is widely applied to many areas of computer science.Ontology construction method consists of manual method and semi-automatic method. Manual method has many drawbacks, such as project complexity, error-prone, build slowly, over-reliance on experts. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a semi-automatic ontology construction method based on relational database.This paper focuses on the following part:Firstly, the research situation at home and abroad are introduced.Then relevant ontology theoretical knowledge used in this paper are introduced, including the definition of ontology, ontology language, ontology editing tools, and brief introduction to Jena and WordNet.Secondly, a relational database to OWL ontology conversion method are proposed and the four concrete steps of this method are given.Then this paper proposes that the method is limited to relational database which meet at least the third normal form. A series of transition rules from relational database to OWL ontologies are given.Thirdly, based on the transition rules mentioned above, the key technologies about SemiOnto are given, including reading the data dictionary for relational database schema and ontology construction technology based on the open source Semantic Web framework Jena.Because of anti-redundant design criteria in relational database, the generated OWL ontology lacks of upper, lower and equivalent concepts, so this paper proposes to extend the initial ontology based on WordNet.Finally, using the key technologies mentioned above, SemiOnto system is developed in Eclipse IDE.Then the details of the system development and runtime environment are given.To verify the effectiveness of the system, an instance is given and the results are analysised.