Re: generic XML to RDF triple mapping

> I believe that it should be possible to map arbitrary XML into RDF triples.
> 
> As part of Redfoot, I would like to define a mapping language for
> describing, in a declarative way and for a particular XML schema, how to map
> instances of that schema into RDF triples.
> 
> Furthermore, I believe that all descriptions of serialization of RDF should
> be separated out of the RDF Syntax specification and could be described
> merely in terms of the mapping language.
> 
> I would imagine that powerful mapping language could be achieved simply by
> mapping XPaths to subject, predicate and object (and perhaps a handful of
> properties such as type and label.
> 
> My first question is: what work, if any, has been done on this kind of
> mapping language? (Extensibility's Schema Adjunct Framework would definitely
> have some input)

<groan>

This is what I get for falling five months behind on this list.  I've just 
come across this message.  We implemented this in 4Suite Server a couple of 
months ago.  Basically, when you add an XML document to the repository, you 
can define what we call a document class.  One of the factets of this is a 
system for extracting RDF from the document.  Our scheme is very simple.  You 
simply register a template consisting of a sequence of tuples, each with three 
XPath expressions, one representing subject, one predicate and one object

You set base URIs to quality predicates, but subjects and objects are copied 
verbatim from the string values of the XPath results.

I'll read on.  Most likely there is more conversation about this on the list, 
but I wanted to make my belated note.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
Software-engineering, knowledge-management, XML, CORBA, Linux, Python

Received on Saturday, 30 December 2000 20:06:42 UTC