Discovering Simple Mappings Between Relational Database Schemas and Ontologies

Ontologies proliferate with the growth of the Semantic Web. However, most of data on theWeb are still stored in relational databases. Therefore, it is important to establish interoperability between relational databases and ontologies for creating a Web of data. An e®ective way to achieve interoperability is ¯nding mappings between relational database schemas and ontologies. In this paper, we propose a new approach to discovering simple mappings between a relational database schema and an ontology. It exploits simple mappings based on virtual documents, and eliminates incorrect mappings via validating mapping consistency. Additionally, it also constructs a special type of semantic mappings, called contextual mappings, which is useful for practical applications. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs well on several data sets from real world domains.