DESIGN RATIONALE IN THE TRIPLIFICATION OF RELATIONAL DATABASES
Rita Cristina Galarraga Berardi · 2015
One of the most popular strategies to publish structured data on the Web is to expose relational databases (RDB) in the RDF format.This process is called in RDB-to-RDF or triplification.Furthermore, the Linked Data principles offer useful guidelines for this process.Broadly stated, there are two main approaches to map relational databases into RDF: (1) the direct mapping approach, where the database schema is directly mapped to an RDF schema; and (2) the customized mapping approach, where the RDF schema may significantly differ from the original database schema.In both approaches, there are challenges related to the publication and to the consumption of the published data.This thesis proposes the capture of design rationale as a valuable source of information to minimize the challenges in RDB-to-RDF processes.Essentially, the capture of design rationale increases the awareness about the actions taken over the relational database to map it as an RDF dataset.The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) a design rationale (DR) model adequate to RDB-to-RDF processes, independently of the approach (direct or customized) followed; (2) the integration of a DR model in an RDB-to-RDF direct mapping process and in an RDB-to-RDF customized mapping process using the R2RML language; (3) the use of the DR captured to improve the recommendations for vocabularies to reuse.