Aligning Relational Schema and OWL Ontologies with Hidden Markov Model

Abstract

The problem of bridging the gap between relational schema and ontologies is actively investigated in the Semantic Web and business communities. The main motivations are the OBDA scenario, where a domain ontology allows to hidden the technical details of the db to end-users; and the persistent storage of ontologies in db for facilitating search and retrieval keeping the benefits of DBMSs such as security and integrity. In these cases, the ABox is usually stored into a db, and the TBox is maintained in an ontology; for this reason, schema alignment is a more significant problem than the instance matching one. The use of manual mappings is hard and expensive, especially for large representations. This paper proposes an innovative approach for solving this problem based on a HMM; it estimates the most likely sequence of symbols describing the structures in the relational schema corresponding to the axioms in the ontology to be aligned. The theoretical background nd the models are described in detail. Finally, the system is compared to the most widespread tools in literature.