A Novel Method for Matching between RDBMS and Domain Ontology

In a web environment, similar information exists in many different places in diverse formats. Even duplicate information is stored in the various databases using different terminologies. Since most information serviced in the current World Wide Web however had been constructed before the advent of ontology, it is practically almost impossible to construct ontology for all those resources in the web. In this paper, we assume that most information in the web environment exist in the form of RDBMS, and propose a matching method between domain ontology and existing RDBMS tables for semantic retrieval. In the processing of extracting a local ontology, some problems such as losing domain in formation can occur since the correlation of domain ontology has not been considered at all. To prevent these problems, we propose an instance-based matching which uses relational information between RDBMS tables and relational information between classes in domain ontology. To verify the efficiency of the method proposed in this paper, several experiments are conducted using the digital heritage information currently serviced in the countrywide museums. Results show that the proposed method increase retrieval accuracy in terms of user relevance and satisfaction.