Mapping Process of Relational Data to OWL Class Instances using XSLT

Ontologies are widely used in many domains and evolve as domains change [7]. From the other side, the relational database technology has ensured the best facilities for storing, updating and manipulating the information of problem domain. We propose in this paper a transformation process from existing data in relational databases into OWL class instances using XSLT. This process allows us to mapping some constraints on columns such as foreign key while maintaining semantic constraints. Our approach start by translate the relational data into adequate XML document conforming to a suitable XML schema. Since our process is based on XSLT Stylesheets, its transformation rules can be modified in a very flexible manner in order to consider different mapping strategies and future requirements.