An automatic approach for Topic Maps development using relational databases

Topic Maps are a Semantic Web technology for semantic annotation of resources to enhance the quality of search output. Manual development of topic maps is a difficult and time consuming task. Furthermore, there are many relational databases with valuable data that semantic search methods cannot use them. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a novel automatic approach to generate topic map from database schema. In this method each part of relational database is transformed to a suitable element in topic map data model. The proposed model is implemented and then applied on a relational database. The resulted topic map validated using the freely available Topic Maps editor, TM4L.