Transforming Graph-Oriented Databases into OWL 2 Ontologies

Abstract

The Semantic Web is an important step in the evolution of the web as a resource sharing platform. It allows for information to be structured in a way that is understandable by computers, and through this to enable the door to a new way of organizing, searching, and using data. In this article, a technique is shown in which a graph database, a Neo4j database, can be converted into an OWL2 ontology or knowledge base. This will provide increased exploitation, semantic interoperability, and reasoning capabilities by incorporating the strengths of both graph databases and ontologies. The process includes systematic steps to identify entities and relationships, define properties, and establish hierarchical structures, along with semi-automated techniques to detect subclasses and sub properties. For validation, a testbed in the form of a small social network database was created that showed that this method could automatically identify sub-classes and sub-properties. The article also reviews the literature and the current developments in data representation and transformation transformations. In general, this technique has a significant impact on data management in enabling new applications to exploit the power of graph-oriented databases and ontologies to scrub data in a more efficient and meaningful way across a spectrum of application domains.