Abstract
BackgroundSemantic web technologies have a tremendous potential for the integration of heterogeneous data sets. Therefore, an increasing number of widely used biological resources are becoming available in the RDF data model. There are however, no tools available that provide structural overviews of these resources. Such structural overviews are essential to efficiently query these resources and to assess their structural integrity and design, thereby strengthening their use and potential.ResultsHere we present RDF2Graph, a tool that automatically recovers the structure of an RDF resource. The generated overview allows to create complex queries on these resources and to structurally validate newly created resources.ConclusionRDF2Graph facilitates the creation of complex queries thereby enabling access to knowledge stored across multiple RDF resources. RDF2Graph facilitates creation of high quality resources and resource descriptions, which in turn increases usability of the semantic web technologies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0038-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Semantic web technologies have a tremendous potential for the integration of heterogeneous data sets
Once data sources are converted into the semantic Web, SPARQL [5, 6] can be used to query multiple of these resources, simultaneously or consecutively, without further modifying any of them
Our tool is complementary to existing tools that help create queries such as SPARQL assist [23], Visor [24] iSPARQL [25] and SPARQLGraph [26], these tools are based on local instance or class relationship browsing, or on query suggestion and completion or on a graphical representation of the SPARQL query
Summary
Semantic web technologies have a tremendous potential for the integration of heterogeneous data sets. There are no tools available that provide structural overviews of these resources Such structural overviews are essential to efficiently query these resources and to assess their structural integrity and design, thereby strengthening their use and potential. Integration and analysis of heterogeneous biological data and knowledge require efficient information retrieval and management systems and Semantic Web technologies are designed to meet this challenge [1]. The RDF data model is a mature W3C standard [2, 3] designed for the integrated representation of heterogeneous information from disparate sources and it is proving effective for creating and sharing biological data. Integration of heterogeneous data from different sources in a single graph relies on using retrievable controlled vocabularies, which is essential to access and analyse integrated data [4]. Once data sources are converted into the semantic Web, SPARQL [5, 6] can be used to query multiple of these resources, simultaneously or consecutively, without further modifying any of them
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