An approach for automatically generating R2RML-based direct mapping from relational databases

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016. For integrating relational databases (RDBs) into semantic web applications, the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group recommended two approaches, Direct Mapping (DM) and R2RML. The DM provides a set of mapping rules according to RDB schema, while the R2RML allows users to manually define mappings according to existing target ontology. The major problem to use R2RML is the effort for creating R2RML mapping documents manually. This may lead to appearance of many mistakes in the R2RML documents and requires domain experts. In this paper, we propose and implement an approach to generate an R2RML mapping documents automatically from RDB schema. The R2RML mapping reflects the behavior of the DM specification and allows any R2RML parser to generate a set of RDF triples from relational data. The input of generating approach is DBsInfo class that automatically generated from relational schema. An experimental prototype is developed and shows the effectiveness of our approach algorithms