RE: mapping a relational database as RDF

I think we're getting a little distracted by the actual RDBMS-to-RDF
mapping implementation, which seems pretty obviously beyond our scope.
The transformation might as well be done by hand in some arbitrary
fashion, and I'm not addressing doing anything at all "clever" or
"semantic" with a database.

Concrete example: a database with two tables:

Cars:
+-------+-------+-------+------+
| Owner | Make  | Color | Year |
+-------+-------+-------+------+
| 1     | Honda | Red   | 1998 |
| 2     | Ford  | Black | 2004 |
| 2     | Kia   | Blue  | 2000 |
+-------+-------+-------+------+
People:
+-----+-------+-----+
| Key | Name  | Age |
+-----+-------+-----+
| 1   | Steve | 41  |
| 2   | Ed    | 25  |
+-----+-------+-----+

Now consider that this data has been translated to:

_:C1 hasMake  "Honda"^^xsd:string
_:C1 hasColor "Red"^^xsd:string
_:C1 hasYear  "1998"^^xsd:int
_:C2 hasMake  "Ford"^^xsd:string
_:C2 hasColor "Black"^^xsd:string
_:C2 hasYear  "2004"^^xsd:int
_:C3 hasMake  "Kia"^^xsd:string
_:C3 hasColor "Blue"^^xsd:string
_:C3 hasYear  "2000"^^xsd:int
_:P1 hasName  "Steve"^^xsd:string
_:P1 hasAge   "41"^^xsd:int
_:P1 ownsCar  _:C1
_:P2 hasName  "Ed"^^xsd:string
_:P2 hasAge   "25"^^xsd:int
_:P2 ownsCar  _:C2
_:P2 ownsCar  _:C3

This may not be your favorite way to transform the relational data to
RDF, but in my experience it's a not-entirely-unrealistic example of
what users do. We only need to agree that the same basic knowledge is
encoded in both formats.

Some queries on the original relational data:

1. "Find me the names and ages of all people who own red cars"
   SELECT DISTINCT People.Name People.Age FROM People, Cars
     WHERE Cars.Owner=People.Key AND Cars.Color="Red"

2. "Find the names of all people who are young, or own a new or
sporty-colored car"
   SELECT DISTINCT People.Name FROM People, Cars
     WHERE People.Age < 26 OR
       (People.Key = Cars.Owner AND
          (Cars.Color = "Red" OR Cars.Color = "Yellow" OR
           Cars.Year >= 2003))

3. "Find the names of all people who own more than one car"
   SELECT People.Name FROM People
      WHERE (SELECT COUNT * FROM Cars
             WHERE Cars.Owner = People.Key) > 1

Users would like to be able to perform similar queries (to return the
same results) on the RDF data.

Received on Friday, 26 March 2004 15:06:38 UTC