A Conceptual-KDD Tool for Ontology Construction from a Database Schema

The UNESCO convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) requires countries to document their oral traditions, performing arts, traditional festivities, and so forth. Several institutions gather ICH, traditionally by hand, and record and disseminate it through conventional information systems (static knowledge in relational databases, RDB). Two difficulties are that (1) review/refinement of their underlying database schemata by domain experts becomes disruptive, and (2) contribution from community, non-expert users becomes hard, even impossible. This article presents an interactive tool that implements a recent technique to perform Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) guided by Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The tool takes an RDB schema (in SQL), translates it into a formal context and later in a concept lattice using the CORON platform, allows domain experts to manipulate it and produces a formal ontology (in RDFS). Later, the ontology can be used to instantiate a semantic wiki as community collaboration tool, for example. The technique and tool are illustrated with an example from the ICH domain, using Chile’s Culture Ministry online data. The tool is also available online.