New versions of the W3C RDB to RDF documents published

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:
  • An R2RML default mapping generator was added to show how the Direct Mapping is used as the default configuration for 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.