Tool for Translating Relational Databases Schema into Ontology for Semantic Web

Success of the Semantic Web depends on mass creation of computer understandable data. Ontology plays more and more important role in creating such semantic data on the Semantic Web. Now there are tools used to generate ontology from legacy database, but it is to some extent difficult for domain expert to understand the meaning between these tools, such as unclear generation approaches, un-unified ontology languages and so on. So in order to reach this goal and to improve the quality of ontology, approach proposed in this paper presents a prototype tool. The key feature of the tool is that it can directly and automatically translate relational database schema into ontology. Compared with existing approaches, it can obtain most implicit semantics in legacy database, including the classes, properties, cardinality and instances. The prototype tool is implemented based on Jena in Java and case study demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.