Translation of Heterogeneous Databases into RDF, and Application to the Construction of a SKOS Taxonomical Reference

International audienceWhile the data deluge accelerates, most of the data produced remains locked in deep Web databases. For the linked open data to benefit from the potential represented by this huge amount of data, it is crucial to come up with solutions to expose heterogeneous databases as linked data. The xR2RML mapping language is an endeavor towards this goal: it is designed to map various types of databases to RDF, by flexibly adapting to heterogeneous query languages and data models while remaining free from any specific language. It extends R2RML, the W3C recommendation for the mapping of relational databases to RDF, and relies on RML for the handling of various data formats. In this paper we present xR2RML, we analyse data models of several modern databases as well as the format in which query results are returned , and we show how xR2RML translates any result data element into RDF, relying on existing languages such as XPath and JSONPath when necessary. We illustrate some features of xR2RML such as the generation of RDF collections and containers, and the ability to deal with mixed data formats. We also describe a real-world use case in which we applied xR2RML to build a SKOS thesaurus aimed at supporting studies on History of Zoology, Archaeozoology and Conservation Biology

xR2RML: Relational and Non-Relational Databases to RDF Mapping Language

This document describes xR2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from various types of databases (XML, object-oriented, NoSQL) to RDF datasets. xR2RML flexibly adapts to heterogeneous query languages and data models while remaining free from any specific language or syntax. It extends R2RML, the W3C recommendation for the mapping of relational databases to RDF, and relies on RML for the handling of various data representation formats.Web version available at: http://i3s.unice.fr/~fmichel/xr2rml_specification_v5.htm

Translation of Relational and Non-Relational Databases into RDF with xR2RML

International audienceWith the growing amount of data being continuously produced, it is crucial to come up with solutions to expose data from ever more heterogeneous databases (e.g. NoSQL systems) as linked data.In this paper we present xR2RML, a language designed to describe the mapping of various types of databases to RDF. xR2RML flexibly adapts to heterogeneous query languages and data models while remaining free from any specific language or syntax. It extends R2RML, the W3C recommendation for the mapping of relational databases to RDF, and relies on RML for the handling of various data representation formats.We analyse data models of several modern databases as well as the format in which query results are returned, and we show that xR2RML can translate any data element within such results into RDF, relying on existing languages such as XPath and JSONPath if needed. We illustrate some features of xR2RML such as the generation of RDF collections and containers, and the ability to deal with mixed content