Architecture for Mapping Relational Database to OWL Ontology: An Approach to Enrich Ontology Terminology Validated with Mutation Test

Abstract

Ontologies are structures used to represent a specific domain. One well-known method to simplify the ontology building is to extract domain concepts from a relational database. This article presents an architecture which enables an automatic mapping process from a relational database to OWL ontology. It proposes to enrich the terminology of ontology elements and it was validated with mutation tests. The architecture mapping process makes use of new and existent mapping rules and overcome lacks not previously addressed, such as the use of database logic model to eliminate duplicated elements of ontology and mapping inheritance relationships from tables and records. We stand out the structure of element mapping, which allows maintaining source-to-target traceability for verification. We validate our approach with two experiments: the first one focuses on architecture validation applying an experiment with three scenarios and the second one uses a testing engine applying a mutation test methodology to OWL ontology validation.