Ontology extraction from relational database: Concept hierarchy as background knowledge

Relational Database (RDB) has been widely used as the back-end database of information system. Contains a wealth of high-quality information, RDB provides conceptual model and metadata needed in the ontology construction. However, most of the existing ontology building approaches convert RDB schema without considering the knowledge resided in the database. This paper proposed the approach for ontology extraction on top of RDB by incorporating concept hierarchy as background knowledge. Incorporating the background knowledge in the building process of Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology gives two main advantages: (1) accelerate the building process, thereby minimizing the conversion cost; (2) background knowledge guides the extraction of knowledge resided in database. The experimental simulation using a gold standard shows that the Taxonomic F-measure (TF) evaluation reaches 90% while Relation Overlap (RO) is 83.33%. In term of processing time, this approach is more efficient than the current approaches. In addition, our approach can be applied in any of the fields such as eGoverment, eCommerce and so on. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.