Relational Databases as Semantic Web Endpoints

This proposal explores the promotion of existing relational databases to Semantic Web Endpoints. It presents the benefits of ontologybased read and write access to existing relational data as well as the need for specialized, scalable reasoning over that data. We introduce our approach for translating SPARQL/Update operations to SQL, describe how scalable reasoning can be realized by using the power of the database system, and outline two case studies for evaluating our approach. 1 Motivation Relational Databases (RDBs) are used in most current enterprise environments to store and manage data. While RDBs are well suited to handle large amounts of data they were not designed to preserve the semantics of that data. This is especially relevant if data from different parties needs to be exchanged or integrated. The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Although invented for the Web, thes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ESWS
• Authors: Matthias Hert
• Keywords: ESWS 2009, Internet Technology, Relational Database, Scalable Reasoning, Semantic Web