Publishing the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate's FactPages as semantic web data

Abstract

This paper motivates, documents and evaluates the process and results of converting the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate's FactPages, a well-known and diverse set of tabular data, but with little and incomplete schema information, stepwise into other representations where in each step more semantics is added to the dataset. The different representations we consider are a regular relational database, a linked open data dataset, and an ontology. For each conversion step we explain and discuss necessary design choices which are due to the specific shape of the dataset, but also those due to the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the representation formats. We additionally evaluate the output, performance and cost of querying the different formats using questions provided by users of the FactPages. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.