Automatic data transformation: breaching the walled gardens of social network platforms
Martin Wischenbart, Stefan Mitsch, Elisabeth Kapsammer, Angelika Kusel, Stephan Lechner, Birgit Pröll, Werner Retschitzegger, Johannes Schönböck, Wieland Schwinger, Manuel Wimmer · 2013
Although many social networks on the Web allow ac-cess via dedicated apis, the extraction of instance data for further use by applications is often a tedious task. As a result, instance data transformation to Linked Data in the form of owl, as well as the inte-gration with other data sources, are aggravated. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a model-driven approach to overcome data model heterogene-ity by automatically transforming schemas and in-stance data from json to owl/xml, utilizing the se-mantic features of owl and Jena inference rules. We present a prototypical implementation on the basis of the Eclipse Modeling Framework. This implementa-tion is applied and evaluated on data from Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Finally, we provide prospects for semantic integration and managing evolution, as well as a discussion of how to generalize our approach to other domains and transformations between arbi-trary technical spaces.