Query Migration from Object Oriented World to Semantic World

— In the last decades, object-oriented approach was able to take a large share of databases market aiming to design and implement structured and reusable software through the composition of independent elements in order to have programs with a high performance. On the other hand, the mass of information stored in the web is increasing day after day with a vertiginous speed, exposing the currently web faced with the problem of creating a bridge so as to facilitate access to data between different applications and systems as well as to look for relevant and exact information wished by users. In addition, all existing approach of rewriting object oriented languages to SPARQL language rely on models transformation process to guarantee this mapping. All the previous raisons has prompted us to write this paper in order to bridge an important gap between these two heterogeneous worlds (object oriented and semantic web world) by proposing the first provably semantics preserving OQLto-SPARQL translation algorithm for each element of OQL Query (SELECT clause, FROM clause, FILTER constraint, implicit/ explicit join and union/intersection SELECT queries)

Streamlining Knowledge Graph Construction with a fa\c{c}ade: The SPARQL Anything project

What should a data integration framework for knowledge engineers look like? Recent research on Knowledge Graph construction proposes the design of a fa\c{c}ade, a notion borrowed from object-oriented software engineering. This idea is applied to SPARQL Anything, a system that allows querying heterogeneous resources as-if they were in RDF, in plain SPARQL 1.1, by overloading the SERVICE clause. SPARQL Anything supports a wide variety of file formats, from popular ones (CSV, JSON, XML, Spreadsheets) to others that are not supported by alternative solutions (Markdown, YAML, DOCx, Bibtex). Features include querying Web APIs with high flexibility, parametrised queries, and chaining multiple transformations into complex pipelines. In this paper, we describe the design rationale and software architecture of the SPARQL Anything system. We provide references to an extensive set of reusable, real-world scenarios from various application domains. We report on the value-to-users of the founding assumptions of its design, compared to alternative solutions through a community survey and a field report from the industry.Comment: 15 page

A Web-based mapping technique foreEstablishing metadata interoperability

Die Integration von Metadaten aus unterschiedlichen, heterogenen Datenquellen erfordert Metadaten-Interoperabilität, eine Eigenschaft die nicht standardmäßig gegeben ist. Metadaten Mapping Verfahren ermöglichen es Domänenexperten Metadaten-Interoperabilität in einem bestimmten Integrationskontext herzustellen. Mapping Lösungen sollen dabei die notwendige Unterstützung bieten. Während diese für den etablierten Bereich interoperabler Datenbanken bereits existieren, ist dies für Web-Umgebungen nicht der Fall. Betrachtet man das Ausmaß ständig wachsender strukturierter Metadaten und Metadatenschemata im Web, so zeichnet sich ein Bedarf nach Web-basierten Mapping Lösungen ab. Den Kern einer solchen Lösung bildet ein Mappingmodell, das die zur Spezifikation von Mappings notwendigen Sprachkonstrukte definiert. Existierende Semantic Web Sprachen wie beispielsweise RDFS oder OWL bieten zwar grundlegende Mappingelemente (z.B.: owl:equivalentProperty, owl:sameAs), adressieren jedoch nicht das gesamte Sprektrum möglicher semantischer und struktureller Heterogenitäten, die zwischen unterschiedlichen, inkompatiblen Metadatenobjekten auftreten können. Außerdem fehlen technische Lösungsansätze zur Überführung zuvor definierter Mappings in ausführbare Abfragen. Als zentraler wissenschaftlicher Beitrag dieser Dissertation, wird ein abstraktes Mappingmodell präsentiert, welches das Mappingproblem auf generischer Ebene reflektiert und Lösungsansätze zum Abgleich inkompatibler Schemata bietet. Instanztransformationsfunktionen und URIs nehmen in diesem Modell eine zentrale Rolle ein. Erstere überbrücken ein breites Spektrum möglicher semantischer und struktureller Heterogenitäten, während letztere das Mappingmodell in die Architektur des World Wide Webs einbinden. Auf einer konkreten, sprachspezifischen Ebene wird die Anbindung des abstrakten Modells an die RDF Vocabulary Description Language (RDFS) präsentiert, wodurch ein Mapping zwischen unterschiedlichen, in RDFS ausgedrückten Metadatenschemata ermöglicht wird. Das Mappingmodell ist in einen zyklischen Mappingprozess eingebunden, der die Anforderungen an Mappinglösungen in vier aufeinanderfolgende Phasen kategorisiert: mapping discovery, mapping representation, mapping execution und mapping maintenance. Im Rahmen dieser Dissertation beschäftigen wir uns hauptsächlich mit der Representation-Phase sowie mit der Transformation von Mappingspezifikationen in ausführbare SPARQL-Abfragen. Zur Unterstützung der Discovery-Phase bietet das Mappingmodell eine Schnittstelle zur Einbindung von Schema- oder Ontologymatching-Algorithmen. Für die Maintenance-Phase präsentieren wir ein einfaches, aber seinen Zweck erfüllendes Mapping-Registry Konzept. Auf Basis des Mappingmodells stellen wir eine Web-basierte Mediator-Wrapper Architektur vor, die Domänenexperten die Möglichkeit bietet, SPARQL-Mediationsschnittstellen zu definieren. Die zu integrierenden Datenquellen müssen dafür durch Wrapper-Komponenen gekapselt werden, welche die enthaltenen Metadaten im Web exponieren und SPARQL-Zugriff ermöglichen. Als beipielhafte Wrapper Komponente präsentieren wir den OAI2LOD Server, mit dessen Hilfe Datenquellen eingebunden werden können, die ihre Metadaten über das Open Archives Initative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) exponieren. Im Rahmen einer Fallstudie zeigen wir, wie Mappings in Web-Umgebungen erstellt werden können und wie unsere Mediator-Wrapper Architektur nach wenigen, einfachen Konfigurationsschritten Metadaten aus unterschiedlichen, heterogenen Datenquellen integrieren kann, ohne dass dadurch die Notwendigkeit entsteht, eine Mapping Lösung in einer lokalen Systemumgebung zu installieren.The integration of metadata from distinct, heterogeneous data sources requires metadata interoperability, which is a qualitative property of metadata information objects that is not given by default. The technique of metadata mapping allows domain experts to establish metadata interoperability in a certain integration scenario. Mapping solutions, as a technical manifestation of this technique, are already available for the intensively studied domain of database system interoperability, but they rarely exist for the Web. If we consider the amount of steadily increasing structured metadata and corresponding metadata schemes on the Web, we can observe a clear need for a mapping solution that can operate in a Web-based environment. To achieve that, we first need to build its technical core, which is a mapping model that provides the language primitives to define mapping relationships. Existing Semantic Web languages such as RDFS and OWL define some basic mapping elements (e.g., owl:equivalentProperty, owl:sameAs), but do not address the full spectrum of semantic and structural heterogeneities that can occur among distinct, incompatible metadata information objects. Furthermore, it is still unclear how to process defined mapping relationships during run-time in order to deliver metadata to the client in a uniform way. As the main contribution of this thesis, we present an abstract mapping model, which reflects the mapping problem on a generic level and provides the means for reconciling incompatible metadata. Instance transformation functions and URIs take a central role in that model. The former cover a broad spectrum of possible structural and semantic heterogeneities, while the latter bind the complete mapping model to the architecture of the Word Wide Web. On the concrete, language-specific level we present a binding of the abstract mapping model for the RDF Vocabulary Description Language (RDFS), which allows us to create mapping specifications among incompatible metadata schemes expressed in RDFS. The mapping model is embedded in a cyclic process that categorises the requirements a mapping solution should fulfil into four subsequent phases: mapping discovery, mapping representation, mapping execution, and mapping maintenance. In this thesis, we mainly focus on mapping representation and on the transformation of mapping specifications into executable SPARQL queries. For mapping discovery support, the model provides an interface for plugging-in schema and ontology matching algorithms. For mapping maintenance we introduce the concept of a simple, but effective mapping registry. Based on the mapping model, we propose aWeb-based mediator wrapper-architecture that allows domain experts to set up mediation endpoints that provide a uniform SPARQL query interface to a set of distributed metadata sources. The involved data sources are encapsulated by wrapper components that expose the contained metadata and the schema definitions on the Web and provide a SPARQL query interface to these metadata. In this thesis, we present the OAI2LOD Server, a wrapper component for integrating metadata that are accessible via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In a case study, we demonstrate how mappings can be created in aWeb environment and how our mediator wrapper architecture can easily be configured in order to integrate metadata from various heterogeneous data sources without the need to install any mapping solution or metadata integration solution in a local system environment

Seamless Integration of RESTful Services into the Web of Data

We live in an era of ever-increasing abundance of data. To cope with the information overload we suffer from every single day, more sophisticated methods are required to access, manipulate, and analyze these humongous amounts of data. By embracing the heterogeneity, which is unavoidable at such a scale, and accepting the fact that the data quality and meaning are fuzzy, more adaptable, flexible, and extensible systems can be built. RESTful services combined with Semantic Web technologies could prove to be a viable path to achieve that. Their combination a1lows data integration on an unprecedented sca1e and solves some of the problems Web developers are continuously struggling with. This paper introduces a novel approach to create machine-readable descriptions for RESTful services as a first step towards this ambitious goal. It also shows how these descriptions along with analgorithm to translate SPARQL queries to HTTP requests can be used to integrate RESTful services into a global read-write Web of Data

Specification and implementation of mapping rule visualization and editing : MapVOWL and the RMLEditor

Visual tools are implemented to help users in defining how to generate Linked Data from raw data. This is possible thanks to mapping languages which enable detaching mapping rules from the implementation that executes them. However, no thorough research has been conducted so far on how to visualize such mapping rules, especially if they become large and require considering multiple heterogeneous raw data sources and transformed data values. In the past, we proposed the RMLEditor, a visual graph-based user interface, which allows users to easily create mapping rules for generating Linked Data from raw data. In this paper, we build on top of our existing work: we (i) specify a visual notation for graph visualizations used to represent mapping rules, (ii) introduce an approach for manipulating rules when large visualizations emerge, and (iii) propose an approach to uniformly visualize data fraction of raw data sources combined with an interactive interface for uniform data fraction transformations. We perform two additional comparative user studies. The first one compares the use of the visual notation to present mapping rules to the use of a mapping language directly, which reveals that the visual notation is preferred. The second one compares the use of the graph-based RMLEditor for creating mapping rules to the form-based RMLx Visual Editor, which reveals that graph-based visualizations are preferred to create mapping rules through the use of our proposed visual notation and uniform representation of heterogeneous data sources and data values. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Building the Semantic Web of Things Through a Dynamic Ontology

The Web of Things (WoT) recently appeared as the latest evolution of the Internet of Things and, as the name suggests, requires that devices interoperate through the Internet using Web protocols and standards. Currently, only a few theoretical approaches have been presented by researchers and industry, to fight the fragmentation of the IoT world through the adoption of semantics. This further evolution is known as Semantic WoT and relies on a WoT implementation crafted on the technologies proposed by the Semantic Web stack. This article presents a working implementation of the WoT declined in its Semantic flavor through the adoption of a shared ontology for describing devices. In addition to that, the ontology includes patterns for dynamic interactions between devices, and therefore we define it as dynamic ontology. A practical example will give a proof of concept and overall evaluation, showing how the dynamic setup proposed can foster interoperability at information level allowing on the one hand smart discovery, enabling on the other hand orchestration and automatic interaction through the semantic information available