Automatic Conversion of Relational Databases into Ontologies: A Comparative Analysis of Protégé Plug-ins Performances

Abstract: Constructing ontologies from relational databases is an active research topic in the Semantic Web domain. While conceptual mapping rules/principles of relational databases and ontology structures are being proposed, several software modules or plug-ins are being developed to enable the automatic conversion of relational databases into ontologies. However, the correlation between the resulting ontologies built automatically with plug-ins from relational databases and the database-to-ontology mapping principles has been given little attention. This study reviews and applies two Prot\'eg\'e plug-ins, namely, DataMaster and OntoBase to automatically construct ontologies from a relational database. The resulting ontologies are further analysed to match their structures against the database-to-ontology mapping principles. A comparative analysis of the matching results reveals that OntoBase outperforms DataMaster in applying the database-to-ontology mapping principles for automatically converting relational databases into ontologies.