Towards a Semantic Web of Relational Databases: A Practical Semantic Toolkit and an In-Use Case from Traditional Chinese Medicine

Integrating relational databases is recently acknowledged as an important vision of the Semantic Web research, however there are not many well-implemented tools and not many applications that are in large-scale real use either. This paper introduces the Dartgrid which is an application development framework together with a set of semantic tools to facilitate the integration of heterogenous relational databases using semantic web technologies. For examples, DartMapping is a visualized mapping tool to help DBA in defining semantic mappings from heterogeneous relational schemas to ontologies. DartQuery is an ontology-based query interface helping user to construct semantic queries, and capable of rewriting SPARQL semantic queries to a set of SQL queries. DartSearch is an ontology-based search engine enabling user to make full-text search over all databases and to navigate across the search results semantically. It is also enriched with a concept ranking mechanism to enable user to find more accurate and reliable results. This toolkit has been used to develop an currently in-use application for China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (CATCM). In this application, over 70 legacy relational databases are semantically interconnected by an ontology with over 70 classes and 800 properties, providing integrated semantic-enriched query, search and navigation services to TCM communities.