Formalisation and experiences of R2RML-based SPARQL to SQL query translation using morph

Abstract

R2RML is used to specify transformations of data available in relational databases into materialised or virtual RDF datasets. SPARQL queries evaluated against virtual datasets are translated into SQL queries according to the R2RML mappings, so that they can be evaluated over the underlying relational database engines. In this paper we describe an extension of a well-known algorithm for SPARQL to SQL translation, originally formalised for RDBMS-backed triple stores, that takes into account R2RML mappings. We present the result of our implementation using queries from a synthetic benchmark and from three real use cases, and show that SPARQL queries can be in general evaluated as fast as the SQL queries that would have been generated by SQL experts if no R2RML mappings had been used.