Ontology Learning from Relational Database: Opportunities for Semantic Information Integration

Abstract

Along with the rapidly growing scale of relational database (RDB), how to construct domain-related ontologies from various databases effectively and efficiently has been a bottleneck of the ontology-based integration. The traditional methods for constructing ontology from RDB are mainly based on the manual mapping and transformation, which not only requires a lot of human experience but also easily leads to the semantic loss during the transformation. Ontology learning from RDB is a new paradigm to (semi-)automatically construct ontologies from RDB by borrowing the techniques of machine learning, it provides potential opportunities for integrating heterogeneous data from various data sources efficiently. This paper surveys the recent methods and tools of the ontology learning from RDB, and highlights the potential opportunities and challenges of using ontology learning in semantic information integration. Initially, the previous surveys on the topic of the ontology-based integration and ontology learning were summarized, and then the limitations of previous surveys were identified and analyzed. Furthermore, the methods and techniques of ontology learning from RDB were investigated by classifying into three categories: reverse engineering, mapping, and machine learning. Accordingly, the opportunities and possibility of using ontology learning from RDB in semantic information integration were discussed based on the mapping results between the bottlenecks of ontology-based integration and the features of ontology learning. a a This paper is an extension of our prior work [C. Ma and B. Molnár, Use of ontology learning in information system integration: A literature survey, in Intelligent Information and Database Systems, eds. P. Sitek, M. Pietranik, M. Krótkiewicz and C. Srinilta, Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 1178 (Springer, Singapore, 2020), pp. 342–353]