Semi-automatically mapping structured sources into the semantic web

Abstract

Linked data continues to grow at a rapid rate, but a limitation of a lot of the data that is being published is the lack of a semantic description. There are tools, such as D2R, that allow a user to quickly convert a database into RDF, but these tools do not provide a way to easily map the data into an existing ontology. This paper presents a semi-automatic approach to map structured sources to ontologies in order to build semantic descriptions (source models). Since the precise mapping is sometimes ambiguous, we also provide a graphical user interface that allows a user to interactively refine the models. The resulting source models can then be used to convert data into RDF with respect to a given ontology or to define a SPARQL end point that can be queried with respect to an ontology. We evaluated the overall approach on a variety of sources and show that it can be used to quickly build source models with minimal user interaction. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.