Using Reverse Engineering for Building Ontologies with Deeper Taxonomies from Relational Databases

摘要

The relational model is characterized by its high quality and has been widely used by information systems. However, unlike the conceptual model, the relational model is semantically poor since it doesn’t enable the representation of inheritance. In this paper, we present an algorithmic approach to extract generalization/ specialization inheritance hierarchies. We perform a reverse engineering by analyzing stored data. Finally, we evaluated our approach by conducting several experiments on relational databases. The results were satisfying in terms of recovering the tables lost during the transformation from the entity relationship model to the relational model.