DB2KB: A framework to publish a database as a knowledge base

Abstract

In the current ‘Web of Documents’ architecture, computers work as a broker of information. Data are published in this web as human understandable form and most of them are stored in databases. Semantic Web technology was introduced with a vision of converting current ‘Web of documents’ to ‘Web of data’ where data are published and exchanged in a machine-readable and understandable format. Moreover, data are linked with other data so that relevant data can be gathered and reasoned. Although databases provide efficient data storage and retrieval through SQL, they are not concerned about semantics of data and hence are not suitable for active inference and reasoning. In this paper, we present a framework called DB2KB. DB2KB converts a database to a knowledge base. It uses Semantic Web constructs to capture the semantics of data in the knowledge base. It also establishes links between local knowledge base and external knowledge bases. We describe a use case and show how our system can be used to solve the problem specified in the use case. Different evaluation techniques show that our system solves the problem of the use case with satisfactory performance.