Exploring logical and hierarchical information to map relational databases into ontologies

Ontologies are formal specifications of conceptualisations. Their designs require to understand the concepts involved in the domain to be mapped. One well-known method to produce ontologies is to extract their concepts from relational databases. We conducted a practical study over a real-world scenario on applying existing rules and we identified open issues to be addressed, such as the utilisation of logical metadata as a proper vocabulary, the implementation targeted to specific domains and mappings of hierarchical and self-hierarchical structures. In this paper, we present a novel approach that overcomes these issues. Our solution uses physical and logical models to enrich the terminology produced in the target ontology. It also contains a more comprehensive set of rules, taking into account instances and (self) hierarchies. We validate our approach with two experiments from the healthcare domain as input.