2012/02/16 by Juan Sequeda, Sequeda, Juan F., Marcelo Arenas +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Access Control and Trust #Advanced Database Systems and Queries #Databases (cs.DB) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1202.3667
openalex publication_date 2012/02/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mapping relational databases to RDF is a fundamental problem for the\ndevelopment of the Semantic Web. We present a solution, inspired by draft\nmethods defined by the W3C where relational databases are directly mapped to\nRDF and OWL. Given a relational database schema and its integrity constraints,\nthis direct mapping produces an OWL ontology, which, provides the basis for\ngenerating RDF instances. The semantics of this mapping is defined using\nDatalog. Two fundamental properties are information preservation and query\npreservation. We prove that our mapping satisfies both conditions, even for\nrelational databases that contain null values. We also consider two desirable\nproperties: monotonicity and semantics preservation. We prove that our mapping\nis monotone and also prove that no monotone mapping, including ours, is\nsemantic preserving. We realize that monotonicity is an obstacle for semantic\npreservation and thus present a non-monotone direct mapping that is semantics\npreserving.\n