Mapping ER Schemas to OWL Ontologies

As the Semantic Web initiative gains momentum, a fundamental problem of integrating existing data-intensive WWW applications into the Semantic Web emerges. In order for today´s relational database supported Web applications to transparently participate in the Semantic Web, their associated database schemas need to be converted into semantically equivalent ontologies. In this paper we present a solution to an important special case of the automatic mapping problem with wide applicability: mapping well-formed Entity-Relationship (ER) schemas to semantically equivalent OWL Lite ontologies. We present a set of mapping rules that fully capture the ER schema semantics, along with an overview of an implementation of the complete mapping algorithm integrated into the current SFSU ER Design Tools software.