New versions of the W3C RDB to RDF documents published

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Ivan Herman

In February 2012, the RDB2RDF Working Group published two Candidate Recommendations, “A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF” and “R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language”. Based on implementation experience, the two documents were modified to improve their compatibility and usability.

  • In the Direct Mapping:
    • The punctuation separating terms in URLs have changed to make it possible to implement the Direct Mapping in R2RML.
  • In R2RML:
  • In both documents
    • Binary data in SQL databases is expressed using xsd:hexBinary
      instead of xsd:base64Binary.

The documents have been published as a (2nd. Last Call) Working Draft as a result. The review period ends  on 19 June 2012. The Working Group then hopes to have sufficient implementations to transition directly from Last Call to Proposed Recommendation.

About Ivan Herman

Ivan Herman is the Semantic Web Activity Lead at W3C. He graduated as a mathematician at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the Leiden University, in the Netherlands. Ivan joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He served as Head of Offices until June 2006, when he was asked to take the Semantic Web Activity Lead position.