On using database techniques for generating ontology mappings

In the Semantic Web, there are a variety of ontologies, which motivates the need for integrating them. Integration tasks rely on the use of relationships amongst the integrated ontologies, known as mappings. The literature reports on a number of techniques to automatically generate such mappings, unfortunately, the results are not suitable to perform integration tasks since they can produce incoherent data. The database community has devised techniques that automatically generate integration-enabling mappings, however, these techniques are not directly applicable to the semantic web context due to the inherent differences between ontologies and database models. In this paper, we present the differences between semantic web ontologies (RDF, RDFS and OWL) and nested relational schemata, which argue to develop new techniques to generate integrationenabling mappings. Furthermore, we analise the requirements to generate integration-enabling mappings in the context of the Semantic Web.