questions on Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web

Hi,
I have a use case in the publishing and processing of language resources 
where we are interested in converting the meta-data of a CSV resource 
into RDF without that actual data.

This would allow us to use SPARQL to search for tables on the meta-data 
attributes without loading all the data into an RDF store. As the tables 
can be large, the latter is an overhead, and unnecessary to our use case 
as there are well developed tools to process or filter tabular language 
data once the tables required are located.

My reading of the mapping algorithm at:
http://w3c.github.io/csvw/csv2rdf/#map-annotated-tab-table

is that it doesn't permit the mapping of data to be omitted, i.e. step 
10 specified 'SHALL'

Had you considered such a meta-data only mapping use cases?

Further, such a mapping would also raise the possibility of having a RDF 
equivalent of the .csvm file accompanying a csv file. This might be 
valuable in use cases where RDF/DCAT crawlers are already in use, which 
could then pick up the meta-data without themselves having to implement 
the JSON-RDF mapping. Am I correct that currently the json .csvm format 
is the only valid format for meta-data.

I haven't been tracking the WG very closely, so my apologies if this has 
already been discussed.

Kind Regards,
Dave

-- 
Director - Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
The CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content
School of Computer Science and Statistics
Trinity College Dublin

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2015 00:14:28 UTC