Ontology Authoring and Linked Data Generation from Web Applications

One of the fundamental problems in the development of the semantic web is what is known as the ontology authoring. This process allows the domain expert to create ontologies and their instances by dedicated tools from relational databases and/or web applications. In this article is presented an approach that allows building OWL ontologies and RDF instances from web applications. The proposed approach starts with a reverse engineering process that aims to recover the original design from the web application source code by using program understanding techniques. Then, a forward engineering process is applied to create an OWL ontology from the recovered diagrams, based on a set of mapping rules. The proposed approach is concertized by a PHP2OWLGen tool and is evaluated with a set of web applications. The obtained results were encouraging and showed the efficiency of the proposed approach.