OntoExtractor : A Tool for Ontology Extraction From ER/EER diagrams

Abstract

Most of the existing data based web applications uses relational data sources or XML based data sources. For these data sources to participate in semantic web, to enable semantic based data access and integration, their associated database schema must be mapped to Ontology. In order to preserve the domain information, we proposed mapping rules to transform ER/EER diagram to semantically equivalent ontology. OntoExtractor automatically converts a XML file representing an ER/EER diagram to Ontology in OWL-DL. The output of OntoExtractor is a conceptual schema in the form of Ontology. We proposed a more efficient concept capturing approach of mapping ternary relation and M:N relation with attributes. We captured key attribute consisting of more than one attribute and composite key attribute. In addition to that, we have presented a DTD for a well-formed ER/EER schema, so that any ER schema can be captured in machine-interpretable XML file.