DSont: DSpace to ontology transformation

Semantic web facilitates the effective sharing and reuse of existing information. Institutional repositories (IRs) are built to organize and manage the intellectual output of an institute. They generally use relational databases for maintaining metadata of digital documents. The focus of this research is to share the information of an existing IR with other information systems for discovering common interests. To process the data in semantic context, a relational database needs to be transformed into an ontology. The existing relation to ontology transformation systems produces odd results if they are applied on an IR database because its schema is meta-schema. The proposed system first creates an intermediate database, having a normalized schema for the data model of an institute preserved in an IR database and then transforms it into an ontology. Finally semantic correspondence is established between entities of source and target ontologies in order to integrate them. The system has been implemented and evaluated for its correct and lossless transformation. The results demonstrate that the transformation is correct and the information is preserved.