Bringing Relational Data into the SemanticWeb using SPARQL and Relational.OWL

Abstract

Despite all the efforts to build up a Semantic Web, where each machine can understand and interpret the data it processes, information is usually still stored in ordinary relational databases. Semantic Web applications needing access to such semantically unexploited data, have to create their own manual relational database to Semantic Web mappings. In this paper we analyze, whether the combination of Relational.OWL as a Semantic Web representation of relational databases and a semantic query language like SPARQL could be an alternative. The benefits of such an approach are clear, since it enables Semantic Web applications to access and query data actually stored in relational databases using their own built-in functionality.