Umeå universitets logga

We propose a method for automatically extracting semantics from data sources. The availability of multiple data sources on the one hand and the lack of proper semantic documentation of such data sources on the other hand call for new strategies in integrating data sources by extracting semantics from the data source itself rather than from its documentation. In this work we focus on relational databases, observing they are created from semantically-rich designs such as ER diagrams, which are often not conveyed together with the database itself. While the relational model may be semantically-poor with respect to ontological models, the original semantically-rich design of the application domain leaves recognizable footprints that can be converted into ontology mapping patterns. In this work, we offer an algorithm to automatically detect and map a relational schema to ontology mapping patterns and offer an empirical evaluation using two benchmark datasets.