Informatica

The advance of the Web has significantly and rapidly changed the way of information organization, sharing and distribution. The next generation of the web, the semantic web, seeks to make information more usable by machines by introducing a more rigorous structure based on ontologies. In this context we try to propose a novel and integrated approach for a semi-automated extraction of ontology-based semantic web from data-intensive web application and thus, make the web content machine-understandable. Our approach is based on the idea that semantics can be extracted by applying a reverse engineering technique on the structures and the instances of HTML-forms which are the most convenient interface to communicate with relational databases on the current data-intensive web application. This semantics is exploited to produce over several steps, a personalised ontology.

In this paper, we present our Form-driven approach for reverse engineering of relationa databases. This methodology uses the information extracted from both form structure and instances as a database reverse engineering input using an interaction with a user. Through a combination of forms structures and data instances analysis, forms relational sub-schemas and their constraints are derived. These relational sub-schemas are mapped to object sub-schemas, which will be merging into global object-oriented schema that presents the whole underlying databases. The resulting global object-oriented schema must be validated as a rich and correct representation of the application domain.